Re: ncurses-base obsolete, but essential
On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Ben Collins wrote:
> There is a way to obsolete essential packages. Dpkg itself already handles
> this. If you install an essential package that conflicts with an already
> installed essential package, that package will be removed without any sort
> of --force options. This is on purpose, and was designed for just this
> purpose.
This doesn't entirely work completly. The problem is that if you have two
essential packages but can only install one, how do you select which one
to install? APT has to make this decision and it is a not an easy problem,
it often doesn't get it right either. [It is possible, that is why we have
the release files now...]
You should be really really carefull with what you do with essential
packages, bo->hamm was a real mess but since then we have been getting
better. I'd recommend just not getting rid of ncurses-base <shrug>
> However, apt does need to realize this, so this bug is valid. Apt will not
> have to add any --force options to dpkg to get this to work, just
> recognize the conflict.
APT doesn't use dpkg's auto-remove features, it probably should, but that
has proven really difficult to get right [and largely unnecessary].
Jason
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