Bug#50832: AMENDMENT] Clarify meaning of Essential: yes
I'm Cc'ing this message to debian-apt, to ask if the following
addittion to policy has any hidden ramifications that might
make it a bad idea.
On Tue, Nov 23, 1999 at 03:25:00PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Nov 1999, Anthony Towns wrote:
>
> > + Since dpkg will upgrade other packages while an _essential_
> ^^^^
> This "will" should be really "may".
>
> > + package is in an unconfigured state, all _essential_ packages must
> > + supply all their core functionality even when unconfigured. If the
> > + package cannot satisfy this requirement it should not be tagged
> > + as essential, and any packages depending on this packages should
> > + instead have explicit Depends: or Pre-Depends: fields as appropriate.
I'm happy with either "will" or "may".
[For the case of a single system "may" is appropriate, when considering
all systems, "will" is appropriate.]
> I'm glad that someone proposed this, but first we should ask ourselves the
> following stupid question, just in case: Have we *actually* verified that
> all the current essential packages (save, possibly current bash) comply
> with this?
Personally, I'd consider such packages either buggy or not essential.
However:
> BTW: I hope this clarification about essential will help APT not to be so
> paranoid by not configuring every essential package just after unpacking
> them. If APT is changed in this way, I guess upgrades will be as smooth
> and fast as they can really be (i.e. as fast as the old FTP method when
> there are not predependency problems).
That's a very good point. We should ask the apt folks about this before
making this policy.
I suspect that they were just working from the interface as it was
specified (where the above paragraph wasn't part of policy), but maybe
there's something else going on.
Thanks,
--
Raul
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