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Re: priorities



On Fri, 7 Dec 2007 00:01:43 +1000, Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> said: 

> Haven't we more or less already moved away from priorities as meaning
> anything particularly important? We have:

> * required/essential -- stuff that can't be removed: libc, dpkg,etc

        Packages which are required to be present for the packaging
 system to be able to install additional packages.  This means dpkg and
 everything dpkg itself needs; if these packages are gone, the system
 can't repair itself, and can not move to a more tenable state.

> * important -- the rest of base, stuff necessary to bootstrap
>   and recover a usable and useful system

        The subset of the OS required to boot and be able to install
 further packages. Note that just required packages might not constitue
 a bootable system.

> * standard -- a minimal collection of useful stuff we'd like to
>   see on every Debian system

> optional -- all the good software in the world
> extra -- obscure stuff

        If we are removing the invariant that everything in optional
 should not conflict with anything else in optional, and extra is where
 the conflicing packages go, is there any reason to retain extra as a
 distinct section?

> I'm not sure if there's any point to continuing to try to make sure
> that nothing >= optional conflicts with anything else >= optional.

        Hmm.  Can you elaborate on this, please? Is it because it is too
 hard to achieve this? Or you think this is something unattainable even
 in theory? It is a nice invariant, if only we could get it to hold for
 Debian.

        manoj
-- 
Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B  924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C



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