Bug#639290: upgrade from squeeze to wheezy fails on i386 (pre-depends loop)

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

David Kalnischkies wrote:

> Would you be equally willing to unpack lets say bash without a
> clear idea then you are able to configure it again [0]? (or X? APT? libc6?)

Yes, I would.  Core packages continue to function when they have been
configured before and are unpacked without deconfiguring.  Otherwise,
the whole system would break unrecoverably during every upgrade in the
unpack stage.

Which is not to say I dislike the idea of prioritizing the
configuration of some packages!  Just that changing de facto policy
like this without documenting it for packagers is not very pleasant.
One way to fix that would be to write a patch for policy.