Re: Processed: severity of 216768 is important
Hello Carsten Hey,
thanks for taking the time to response. :)
(sorry no quotes ~ i have written this with your mail only in brain-cache)
Imagine the following: Further progress will be made and perl(-base)
is no longer required to be essential. The flag will be dropped and
a user can remove it without problems (beside loosing perl).
The "funpart" here is: As perl-base was an essential package other
packages from the same release were not required to depend on it.
So a user who removes it will immediately break all packages
who depend on it implicit - e.g. an (by this time) older dpkg version.
(other packages as well and more likely -- just a simple example)
Yes, you need to mix sources to have an ill effect, but you have
different sources activated so possibly you use packages from
different sources. If you wouldn't mix, why you have the sources?
That is not a rhetorical question: Why users have the sources
still present if they don't intend to get a package from it (anymore)?
Does it not sound ironical that they want to remove obsolete
packages but not obsolete package sources?
Yes, apt could stop printing this scary messages as every other
package manager doesn't print them, resulting in interesting
default actions for silly commands like $pkgmanager remove perl-base,
but i actually like the safety net as the same people who are
scared by this message are likely also protected by it.
In the end, how many essential package do we have?
And how many of these are renamed, splitted or whatever?
Also, the message tells explicit that it is maybe wrong and it
can be easily forced with the flag or the little sentence.
(not to forget that the message would never show up if your
sources would be as clean as you want your system to be)
Users/applications who are sure that they know what they do
can still use dpkg directly or force apt to do it, as they are sure
and apt wouldn't call dpkg differently in the end -
BUT if they are unsure, i am again pretty happy that this
message forces the user to think twice...
So debfoster/ophaner/online "tips" have 3 options:
a) force apt to do what you want
b) remove the -y flag and let the user confirm everything
c) use dpkg directly
Note that using the -y flag alone is already a bad thing
if the user/application isn't sure about what he do
as packages like xserver are far from being essential
package-wise but user-wise. So if someone is brave enough
to use -y for a remove, he can also use --force-yes...
Again, i think the sole problem is that apt (and other managers)
doesn't know that a package is only here for transition.
The creation of such a relation is discussed from time to
time, maybe we will see it in the future. I personally
think something like packagemanager-hint-debtags would
be rather useful for many cases, but that is a different topic...
Best regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
David "DonKult" Kalnischkies
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