Re: An introduction to Debian's topology/structure/???
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 08:44:13AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
First I'm looking comparison of required, important, standard,
optional, and extra as package labels [particularly interested in
corner cases]. I've been looking at
[https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/]. I'm not grasping
something. Not sure what ;/
Well, it's hard to answer questions when you don't ask a question. For
the most part the priorities don't matter much, and are largely a
historical curiosity. Extra is gone, standard and important don't mean
much. So most packages are optional, and a few that should be really
hard to remove are required. Being required has the possible advantage
that other packages don't need to explicitly list dependencies on the
required package (but in practice you usually end up with a versioned
libc6 dependency anyway). It does save a bit on the overhead of every
single package having dependencies on /bin/sh and coreutils that the
dependency resolver would then have to consider.
Mike Stone
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