Re: Bug#479080: debian-policy: Policy '3.8 Essential packages' does not explain when/why essential is neccessary
* Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> [080605 19:04]:
> This is not part of the rationale for a package's inclusion in Essential,
> it's an effect of a package's inclusion in Essential.
>
> Packages should only be in the Essential set if they have to be there to
> guarantee the operation of dpkg.
I've experimented recently with some more minimal build chroots (even
dropping some essential stuff), and I do not think that above matches
the current situation.
I think currently it is more of "if they have to be there to garantee
a working system".
Things like passws, sysvinit, mount, e2fsprogs, sysvinit-utils,
libpam-modules or login are as far as I can tell not needed at all
to have dpkg functionally, but as far as I can guess are only essential
because removing them would bring a non-chroot system easily in an
unusable state.
(Surprisingly many things even still work without util-linux, though
splitting it into a mkfs*/fsck* part (which needs the libuuid1
dependency which again pulls in passwd, which again pulls in more stuff)
in an extra package seems a more sensible choice if things were to change
in a way to allow more minimal build chroots).
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
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