Re: Okay to remove obsolete required packages like "base"?

[Rick Macdonald <rickmacd@home.com>]

George Bonser wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 28 Feb 1999, Bob Nielsen wrote:
> 
> > What is "base"?  I have three systems (hamm, slink and potato) and none of
> > them list a package by this this name in dselect (I don't recall it from
> > rex, either.) I do see base-files, base-passwd, xbase, etc.
> 
> I think it dates back to buzz and earlier but I am not sure exactly when
> it disappeared.

I got rid of base from dselect a couple of years ago or so by, IIRC,
carefully editting /var/lib/dpkg/status for the base package. I changed
the Status to:

      Status: purge ok not-installed

I see that base is still in /var/lib/dpkg/info, but I was afraid to
removed these:

  -rw-r--r--   1 root          119 Jul 14  1996 base.conffiles
  -rw-r--r--   1 root        12077 Nov 27  1996 base.list
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 root         1251 Jul 14  1996 base.postinst

But, at least I don't see it in dselect anymore.

Just yesterday I upgraded to slink and removed some of the same packages
that you listed (ncurses, newt, etc). I did a purge on them ("_") and it
didn't complain.

-- 
...RickM...