On Sat, 16 Dec 1995, Ian Jackson wrote: > Packages which are not essential in and of themselves, but are > essential merely because they (for example) provide shared libraries > for others should probably not be marked essential. > > The dependency scheme will prevent their premature removal, if > properly used.
Granted, but there are probably a lot of deficiencies in dependency declarations. I'm doubtful that we'll ever get near 100% correctness on this. Should all packages which use common unix commands provided by essential digest packages such as cat (textutls), echo (shellutls), mkfs (miscutls) declare explicit dependencies on the digest packages they need, or is the fact that the digest packages are essential sufficient to omit explicit declaration of dependencies on them? If essential packages depend on shared libs, should those essential packages declare dependencies on nonessential shared libs? Should essential packages be dependent on nonessential shared libs?
