Re: What to do with "base"???

[Santiago Vila Doncel <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Mark Phillips wrote:

> My system is now uptodate with the newly released Slink, but there are
> now a number of obsolete packages.  In particular, there are two
> _required_ packages listed as obsolete:
> 
>     ------- Obsolete/local Required packages in section base -------
>  *__ Req base     base         1.1.0-14    <none>
>  *** Req base     slang0.99.38 0.99.38-6   <none>
> 
> When dselect attempts to delete base, it complains that
> 
>     This is an essential package - it should not be removed.
> 
> Now I could use dpkg to force its removal, but when I asked about this
> on the list earlier, George Bonser told me:
> 
>     NO!!!!!!!! DO NOT REMOVE BASE! IT WILL KILL YOUR SYSTEM!!!
> 
>     Just wait, that is a known bug and is on the list of bugs that must be
>     fixed. Leave it until there is a solution for the
>     problem. Otherwise you will remove several vital packages.
> 
> But now that Slink has been officially released, has this bug been
> fixed?

Actually, this bug was the mix of two different bugs:

1) APT lets the user to remove an essential package.
2) base is "obsolete", but it is still required and essential.

Whether or not 1) is already fixed I don't know. I think it is not.

About 2), we are not sure yet about the best thing to do.
dpkg -L will show that this package still contains many device files, so
you should not try to remove it.

Most probably, we will deal with bug 2) by providing a recipe to get rid
of it in a safe way, but no package will follow the recipe directly.

> Is there a way to safely remove base?

Well, it depends. You may try something like this:

[ Warning: You don't need to remove "base", this is only an aesthetical
issue. The following recipe is provided as is, without any warranty of any
kind, etc. etc. ].

cd /var/lib/dpkg/info
:> base.list
dpkg -L base   (to check that it contains no files).
dpkg --purge --force-remove-essential base

> (Not to mention slang0.99.38)

Removing slang0.99.38 safely is very easy: Just try to remove it
and if dselect does not "complain", then you may remove it safely.

If some package still depends on it, dselect will complain and will show
you the famous conflict/resolution screen.

[ Of course, this will only work if you do not have any third-party
  software compiled against slang0.99.38 ].

[ As a general rule, you can do the same with any other library
  package ].

Thanks.