So far, we only got two advices but, imho, enough motivated to make me change my initial feeling.
It seems that nothing has yet motivated that passwd should indeed be Essential: yes. Steve bringed the very interesting rationale: "I think we really should not be using it *except* for packages that we require to be functional when in an unconfigured state. The passwd package certainly doesn't qualify in this". He's right: passwd is perfectly functional in unconfigured state. He also counters the argument of paswd utilities being needed in config scripts by explaining that packages requiring useradd/userdel/etc in *config* scripts are probably wrong. Lars added mostly the following: "Is there a problem with packages that need stuff from passwd simply depending on passwd". He also seems right. There doesn't seem to be any problem to this as long as the requirement is not in config scripts. Moreover, most package who would depend on some passwd stuff probably would because they need to add/remove users or groups. However, a recent survey has proven that indeed nearly all packages doing this actually (Pre-)Depend on adduser and use the high-level utilities in adduser rather than low-level utilities from passwd. For the above reason, some of these package may be indeed broken if they require either adduser or useradd in their config script. But that's these packages problem not passwd problem. In summary, it will need a lot more advices following Kurt Roeckx suggestion in #345651 to change my mind back and make passwd Essential. Kurt, would you mind commenting? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
