Re: gawk as essential...

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Yves Arrouye writes ("gawk as essential..."):
> Since some sensible alternatives to gawk are allowed, why is it marked as
> essential? If I want to install mawk or another nawk, I ought to be able
> to remove gawk since I don't really want to have both installed.
> 
> I think it would be nice to have gawk and mawk (and any other nawk) providing
> a virtual package nawk (if this is not already done, but it's not the case
> on my system with gawk_3.0.0-2 and mawk_1.2.2-1, nor does my (maybe outdated)
> virtual packages list mention an nawk package), and other packages would
> depend on nawk when needed (or on a really specific gawk/mawk if they do
> have special features needed).
> 
> Is gawk really essential, or can it be replaced by mawk for all its
> actual uses?

This is a good point.

If we want to make gawk nonessential in favour of mawk perhaps, we
should make sure that the base package depends on `awk' or `nawk' or
whatever the virtual package name is.

Then dselect/dpkg/&c will DTRT.

Ian.