Re: Depending on an essential package

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> wrote:

> Reduces the memory wasted and speeds up processing in dpkg, dselect,
> apt, aptitude, britney, ...

It's also useful for simple humans looking at the dependencies of a
package: having all dependencies, including those on essential packages,
would clutter the Depends line without adding much value in most cases.
For instance, I would not be very interested to learn that $PACKAGE
depends on debianutils for the only reason that it uses /usr/bin/which
or /bin/mktemp in a script. But several such explicit dependencies would
really clutter the Depends line, and /that/ would be annoying.

-- 
Florent