Priorities overrides? Extra?
Hi all,
Paul Wise gave me the hint that for one of my packages (src:erfa) the
"Priority" field is overwritten (it is "extra", while I specified
"optional" in the package).
When I look into the "overrides" file for debian stretch:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/indices/override.stretch.main.gz
I find there more than 48.000 overrides; which means that almost *all*
packages are overridden.
What is the reason for that? I would expect that overriding is something
exceptional, but not the common way to set the priority?
Looking into the priorities, I found:
66 required
64 important
86 standard
34854 optional
13191 extra
which means that almost one third of the packages is priority
"extra". From the policy, I would expect that the main reasons to give
the priority "extra" are either a conflict with another package, or the
dependency on a package with priority "extra".
However, when I look for "extra" packages which have "conflicts", I
found only ~450 packages that have this field set (and that do not
conflict with themself, f.e. an earlier version). And from the "extra"
packages, about 12.000 are not affected by these (so they could, by
policy, have priority "optional").
Since "optional" gives the safety of having no conflicts, I wonder why
* so many packages have priority "extra"
* this cannot be changed by simply changing it in the package (since it
stays overridden in the ftp-master's override file).
The rationale behind this question is the preparation of default
installations within the Debian Pure Blends concept. For a default
installation (selected by install-cd's tasksel), it is expected to have
no conflicts in the installation. The easiest way to achieve this would
be to use only "optional" packages. This, however does not work in the
moment, since there are so many packages in the blends with priority
"extra" (of whoose the majority could easily set to "optional").
What is the idea behind the current structure?
Best regards
Ole
Reply to: