A proposal to fix breakage with Essential

[Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

We should have an empty package called essential all packages explicitly
declare a dependency on. Then when a package depends on a relatively recent
addition to Essential it could include an explicit version dependency 
 Depends: essential (> 1.1), ...

This would solve the problem of packages depending on new packages with the
Essential: yes tag that users haven't downloaded yet. In other words the "oh I
have to run dist-upgrade today" problem. Currently there's no way for users to
know that the reason packages are randomly failing (often in the configuration
stage which breaks apt-get) is because they need to run dist-upgrade.

I wonder if this couldn't even be handled automatically by sufficiently clever
use (abuse?) of dpkg-shlibdep.

-- 
greg