Re: Bug#55167: ncurses-base obsolete, but essential
On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Joey Hess wrote:
> Package: apt
> Version: 0.3.16
> You're missing a lot of history. Historically, the only way to remove an
> essential package has been "dpkg --force-essential --remove foo". You could
> not do it from inside dselect. Dselect remove methods probably just gave up
> with something like:
And previously, during the hamm release cycle this was a necessary
requirement to upgrade! So APT quitely removed essential packages
'magically and correctly'. Now, during the potato dev cycle someone messed
something up and APT removed bash or something foolish - and people didn't
notice.
Since it is no longer necessary to remove essential packages, or do other
high-risk operations to upgrade, I threw in the evil prompt. I think it
can be supressed in the config file, I forget.
> I do think that apt should be modified to omit the prompt if some other
> essential package declares a conflicts (and perhaps a replaces too?) on the
> obsolete essential package. Jason, the idea there is that we need *some* way
As I said to Ben, Don't Do That. Obsoleting/renaming essential packages
is really just asking for it - APT has no way of knowing when it is safe
to remove them because there are no implicit depencies - so it might
remove an essential package and break half your system during the upgrade.
Looking at ncurses-base, I don't think it should have ever been made
Essential, so this is probably more hold over cruft from before :|
Jason
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