Re: Essential [Re: Switching /bin/sh to dash (part two)]

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2009-07-22 18:06 +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:

> mawk is alway installed (required and a dependency of an essential package).

Wrong, you can easily remove mawk if you like, as long as you have
another package that provides awk:

,----
| % LANG=C aptitude -s remove mawk
| Reading package lists... Done
| Building dependency tree       
| Reading state information... Done
| Reading extended state information      
| Initializing package states... Done
| Reading task descriptions... Done  
| The following packages will be REMOVED:
|   mawk 
| 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 22 not upgraded.
| Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 233kB will be freed.
| Would download/install/remove packages.
`----

But you cannot remove _all_ packages providing awk: 

,----
| % LANG=C aptitude -s remove mawk gawk original-awk
| Reading package lists... Done
| Building dependency tree       
| Reading state information... Done
| Reading extended state information      
| Initializing package states... Done
| Reading task descriptions... Done  
| The following packages are BROKEN:
|   base-files dictfmt tla 
| The following packages will be REMOVED:
|   gawk mawk original-awk 
| 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 22 not upgraded.
| Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 2466kB will be freed.
| The following packages have unmet dependencies:
|   base-files: PreDepends: awk which is a virtual package.
|   tla: Depends: gawk but it is not installable
|   dictfmt: Depends: gawk but it is not installable
| The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
| 
| Keep the following packages at their current version:
| gawk [1:3.1.6.dfsg-3 (unstable, now)]
| 
| Score is -9939
| 
| Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] q
| Abandoning all efforts to resolve these dependencies.
| Abort.
`----

Sven