Re: FAQ: Essential vs. Required
On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Oohara Yuuma wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2003 01:43:31 +0200 (CEST),
> Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> wrote:
> > gzip, for example, is essential and depends on libc6. By policy, libc6
> > should not be essential because it's a library. No matter how few packages
> > you have installed, you would need a --force option to remove libc6 anyway.
> > So I would say libc6 is not a good example in either case, regardless
> > of the number of packages installed.
>
> If libc7 is released and if everything that depends on some C library is
> upgraded, you don't want to keep libc6 forever. That is why libc6 should
> not be marked as essential.
If you read my previous message, you will notice I am well aware of that,
but the fact is that libc6 is essential-de-facto, unlike mbr, procps,
passwd, makedev and modutils, which are truly required-and-not-essential.
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