Bug#729526: ssh.deb: somewhat misleading description
Regid Ichira <regid23@nt1.in> writes:
> Indeed I had to unmarkauto first. My point is that my understanding of
> the description is that I could remove the ssh package without
> unmarkauto. Which is why I think the description should be modified.
> Am I the only one who might understand the description this way?
You're probably not the only one. However, the wording is also very
standard for these sorts of transitional packages and is used in dozens,
possibly hundreds, of other packages in Debian, so you'll probably run
into it elsewhere as well. And the statement in the description is true
from the perspective of Debian's core package management (dpkg and
friends). The behavior that you ran into is an added feature of aptitude
that's layered on top.
The correct fix is for aptitude to be smart enough to not remove the
dependencies of a transitional package that's marked as obsolete, and then
people can just delete these packages and the right thing will happen. I
thought I heard some rumblings about that support being added to aptitude,
but I'm not sure what happened to that.
(I should note that I'm not one of the ssh package maintainers, so this is
just third-party commentary.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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