essential and transitivly-essential
* Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> [120131 20:53]:
> Well, I would argue that packages in the essential set shouldn't be adding
> new dependencies without some discussion and review on debian-devel first.
> That's not technically required by policy, but pulling new packages into the
> transitively-essential package set has the same sort of potentially
> disruptive effect on upgrades that adding pre-depends does.
It's also a pity that it is not that easy to see which packages are in
this set. Given that transitively-essential means:
- the package must be unpackaged manually
- it must work without any preinst or postinst script being run
(at least good enough for dpkg and all the other essential and
transitivily essential's packages preinst and postinst).
- it is unpacked twice in a deboostrap (once manually, then with
dpkg)
Thus it would be nice if that would more explicitly marked and could
also be reduced a bit.
My proposal is still:
- Add a new priority "essential" for the "must always be available"
(so this is what in a bootstrap is unpackaged manually).
Require that Priority essential packages only depend on Priority
essential, so this is the new transitively-essential set.
- Reduce "Essential: yes" with "Priority: required" to mean only
that cannot be removed easily. So things like mount or initscripts
must not be unpacked twice and available in every buildd chroot.
- Reduce the set of "does not need depended on" to "Essential: yes"
and "Priority: essential".
Bernhard R. Link
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