Re: Appropriate warning when removing important package
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:06:56PM -0700, Jeremy Leibs wrote:
> We have kind of a unique environment in that many of the (somewhat
> naive) system users have root-access for installing new packages on an
> as-needed basis, but the development environment itself has some
> specific requirements. For example, we require libboost1.37-dev over
> libboost-dev.
>
> I have create a trivial deb called "ros-conflicts" which just
> explicitly conflicts with the packages we need to avoid.
>
> Unfortunately, when users are doing large apt-get installs, they will
> just blindly hit "yes" without thoroughly inspecting the list of
> packages which may be removed, putting their system in an unusable
> (from a development standpoint) state.
>
> My initial workaround was to just add "Essential: yes" to the
> ros-conficts control file so that now users get a much more serious
> warning when they try to install a package that conflicts with it.
> However, this feels like a misuse of "essential."
<shrug> Works for me. They're essential packages for your environment, so
why not mark them as such? Uploading them to Debian would be a no-no, but I
think that's not real likely.
- Matt
Reply to: