Re: gawk as essential...

[Bill Mitchell <mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com>]

Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> said:

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.
>[...]
> 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.

Would we be making gawk nonessential in favor of mawk, or just making
gawk nonessential (removable)?  If it's made removable, any packages
needing awk will, of course, need to depend on something which provides
it.  Presuming that mawk is a fully compatable awk-alike (I've never used
it), both the gawk and mawk (and any other packages needing awk) will
need a Depends field added to their control files.  It'd probably be
best for all awk-alike packages to "Provides: awk" in their control
files, and for dependent packages to "Depends: awk".

When I handed off the dchanges package it needed gawk, but I don't
think there was a Depends field in the control file.  I never tried
dchanges with mawk, but I seem to recall that it had problems with
gawk if it was invoked as "awk" instead of "gawk".