On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 19:52, Neil Williams
<codehelp@debian.org> wrote:
Essential only means that
packages which depend on an Essential package do not (indeed should
not) specify a dependency on those packages
So the packages depending on one of these essential packages assume that they are installed. They uses some functionality within an essential package and fail if it is not available.
And that is what I experience in my system: Some packages don't work or throw cryptic error messages and after some analysis it came out that a package is missed. Once I found the missed package I see it's classified as "essential", which (with my brand new knowledge:-) explains why it was not within the dependency chain ...
Now I understand this Essential classification as "required for installation of other packages".
In Emdebian, there is no common package set and users are free to
ignore all Priority settings.
OK, I understand, this makes sense!
Essential
packages receive special handling by dpkg and apt which complicates the
freedom to use only the specific packages that an Emdebian system might
need, therefore Emdebian drops the Essential flag completely.
Hmm, than we lost the information about which packages are in this group of implicit referred essential packages.
> Due to problem with my installation by missing/wrong packages I need
> to review all these essential packages,
No, what you need is to work out just which packages you need for your
system. Generally, you can add all Priority: required packages and then
prune those back.
good approach. Maybe these "Priority: required" packages also contain the former Debian "Essential" packages, than we didn't loos the dependency problem mentioned above.
$ man multistrap.
Yes, I will introduce myself in multistrap, until now I hoped apt-get is enough....
grep-available -FPriority 'required' -sPackage
This gives you a full list of Priority: required packages but you won't
necessarily need all of them.
I've tried this on my Emdebian installation, but it only shows the Priority: required packages within the packages I've already installed. That one missed on my system are still not shown :-(
Is there some command or web-site fetching the information out of the online package repository?
Thanks a lot
Achim