Bug#282278: apt mixes essential flag from all sources
David Kalnischkies wrote:
> In that case what means 'other suite' here? It is just 'not the currently
> installed suite for perl-base'? But this tells us nothing
[...]
> In all but the last case changing the message is just plain wrong.
Maybe it is enough to change the message unconditionally, then. It
currently says "WARNING: The following essential packages will be
removed". A person can easily get confused by running "dpkg -s
<package>" and finding the "Essential: yes" flag is not there. Maybe
something like
WARNING: The following packages which are essential in some suite
will be removed
would avoid that confusion.
I agree with you that "Essential: yes" is technically something like
an implied Pre-Depends from all packages and that this means the
Essential flag on the installed version of a package is not actually
relevant. But as the 7 or so bugs this used to be merged with
illustrate, that's not necessarily obvious when people first run into
it. :) Therefore in an ideal world it would be nice to do
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed
fileutils (essential in sarge)
textutils (essential in sarge)
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
I was thinking that an approximation would be to put "some other
suite" instead of "sarge" to at least get the reader thinking along
the right lines; this wouldn't need to involve changing the cache
format since this message does not need to be shown very often so it
can be slow.
I guess even better would be to keep a list of the sources that caused
a package to be considered essential somewhere. That is a bit beyond
my depth, unfortunately.
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