Re: RFC: Standardizing a new Protected field

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

Guillem Jover wrote:
> Summary
> -------
> 
> The goal of the following proposal is to standardize a field to split
> part of the Essential packages, and add support for it in the package
> management stack. There is currently an Important field, that has the
> correct semantics but has a very confusing name and is only supported
> by apt anyway, so this new field would phase out that one.
[...]
> The proposal would be to add support for a new Protected field, with the
> following properties:
> 
>   - Protected packages should not be trivial to remove (require a force
>     option for example, like Essential).
>   - Protected packages should not be required to be installed (i.e. once
>     removed they should not be automatically brought back by a frontend,
>     unlike Essential).
>   - Protected packages must be depended on explicitly (unlike Essential).
>   - Protected packages must be functional even when unpacked (think of
>     a boot loader or an init system; like Essential). [XXX: This one is
>     not entirely clear and might not match reality anyway, e.g. kernels,
>     which might require building an initramfs, etc.]

This proposal looks great to me! I'm glad that it doesn't remove the
requirement to declare dependencies; that makes it more feasible to
carefully manage such packages without worrying about mysterious
breakage.

I'd love to see several of the packages currently marked Essential move
over to using Protected instead.

- Josh Triplett