Bug#452393: [PROPOSAL] clarify overstep between "required" and "important" priorities
Julien Cristau wrote:
> - debconf-i18n, liblocale-gettext-perl, libtext-charwidth-perl,
> libtext-iconv-perl, libtext-wrapi18n-perl: since debconf 1.5.39 -i18n
> is only a Recommends. Could probably be downgraded to important?
I think so. [1] has some context.
> - mawk: one of the alternatives for base-files' Pre-Depends, so actually
> pseudo-essential
Good catch. That means the wording needs a little more work, to
explain that only one of 'mawk' and 'gawk' (and one of 'sysv-rc' and
'file-rc', etc) has to be of priority required. (*)
Maybe we should define it as a minimal set of packages implementing
the essential functionality (§3.8) instead of defining it in terms of
essential packages. Other ideas?
Here's the current patch for reference. It doesn't address the point
marked above with (*).
[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debconf-devel/2012-March/003267.html
diff --git i/policy.sgml w/policy.sgml
index 52dbb26a..81511730 100644
--- i/policy.sgml
+++ w/policy.sgml
@@ -757,9 +757,8 @@
<taglist>
<tag><tt>required</tt></tag>
<item>
- Packages which are necessary for the proper
- functioning of the system (usually, this means that
- dpkg functionality depends on these packages).
+ Packages tagged <tt>Essential: yes</tt> and their
+ dependencies.
Removing a <tt>required</tt> package may cause your
system to become totally broken and you may not even
be able to use <prgn>dpkg</prgn> to put things back,
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