Re: Anybody know why aptitude is not installed by default in Sid?

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com>]

As shown below, aptitude has been progressively downgraded from “important” in oldstable (Wheezy) to “standard” in stable (Jessie), “standard” in testing (Stretch) and finally to “optional” in unstable (Sid)

rbthomas@cube:~$ aptitude -vv show aptitude | egrep '^(Priority|Version|Archive): ' | sed 's/^Version: /        &/'
	Version: 0.7.4-1
Priority: optional
Archive: unstable
	Version: 0.7.4-1
Priority: optional
Archive: unstable
	Version: 0.7.4-1
Priority: optional
Archive: now
	Version: 0.7.2-1
Priority: optional
Archive: testing
	Version: 0.6.11-1+b1
Priority: standard
Archive: stable
	Version: 0.6.11-1+b1
Priority: standard
Archive: stable
	Version: 0.6.8.2-1
Priority: important
Archive: oldstable


And exim4 has gone from “standard” in all versions (at least those I have access to) before testing to “optional” in testing and above.

rbthomas@cube:~$ aptitude -vv show exim4 | egrep '^(Priority|Version|Archive): ' | sed 's/^Version: /   &/'
	Version: 4.86-4
Priority: optional
Archive: unstable
	Version: 4.86-4
Priority: optional
Archive: testing
	Version: 4.86-4
Priority: optional
Archive: unstable
	Version: 4.86-4
Priority: optional
Archive: now
	Version: 4.84-8
Priority: standard
Archive: stable
	Version: 4.84-8
Priority: standard
Archive: stable
	Version: 4.80-7+deb7u1
Priority: standard
Archive: oldstable


This (and several other downgrades) seem to have been discussed on the debian-boot list in May, 2015.  See the thread that starts at
    https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2015/05/msg00156.html
for details.

I have a small script I run after finishing any install that loads and configures several packages that I use regularly but are not included in a standard install.  It just got a whole lot bigger!

Sigh!
Rick