On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:10:10 +0100 Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote: > On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 10:02:22PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote: > > .... and having Essential in the Packages file makes it harder than it > > could be to avoid Essential if the list was in /etc. > > If the list is in /etc, an ignorant user may modify the list (remember, > /etc is system-local!) and break their system. It is a system-local implementation that would be the only way of preserving Essential for my purposes. If not system-local, at the most "device-type" specific. (Where device-type is not desktop vs embedded but embedded variant A vs embedded variant B - we all know how often devices change variant ....) The chances of a user being able to access /etc/ on an embedded device are lower than on a desktop machine and some might not allow any authorised access to /etc/. Some systems might offer a synaptic-type GUI interface without having any hardware to support direct terminal access, possibly. > It is a *good* thing that Essential is hard to modify. It leads to an all-or-nothing situation - Essential contains too many packages for any embedded device and those packages cannot be replaced without removing all (because nobody can afford to have an entire repository per system). I'm wondering if an apt configuration setting could be devised that tells apt/aptitude to use a file in /etc/ in situations where no Essential tags exist in the Packages file. Emdebian could then continue to remove all Essential tags from package control files but allow some systems to specify their own list of Essential packages and Debian could continue with a hard to modify list. A kind of "Essential-fallback" option. If Essential is worth having, there needs to be a way of implementing it without changing the archive every single time - even possibly changing it on-the-fly. Either that or just have no Essential at all. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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