Bug#50832: AMENDMENT] Clarify meaning of Essential: yes

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

On Tue, Nov 23, 1999 at 10:53:57AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 1999 at 02:54:56PM +0000, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > But: I just realised.  For bash (or whatever essential packages
> > provide /bin/sh and /bin/perl), the situation is far worse: what
> > happens if a package is *removed* when the symlink is not in place
> > (because the package is not properly configured)?  Then if the
> > {pre,post}rm use /bin/sh or /bin/perl, that will also fail.  And I do
> > not believe that dpkg pays any attention to dependencies for removing
> > packages, so the solution proposed above technically fails for /bin/sh
> > and /bin/perl.
> 
> If apt removes an essential package without an unpacked replacement
> that's an apt bug.

I didn't mean that: I obviously wasn't clear enough.

If we downgrade some package such as bash to non-essential, and make
everything pre-depend on it (which would be ludicrous), then things
would go wrong.

Since we are not going to ever make /bin/sh or /bin/perl
non-essential, this doesn't really matter so much.  But the rest of
the idea, that no {pre,post}rm script may depend on something
non-essential still holds.

   Julian

-- 
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  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
        Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://www.debian.org/~jdg