On Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:25:08 -0700 Steve Langasek <vor...@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 06:04:16PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote: > > Personally, I'm not that fussed about Essential anymore - Emdebian just > > removes the tag from any and every package automatically. No ill effects > > have been identified so far. Sometimes I wonder if Debian actually > > needs Essential any more for anything particularly useful or > > commonplace. > > Then you clearly don't understand the purpose of Essential. I understand the theory, I've just never seen the practical purpose of the current mechanism. Yes, it shortens Depends: lines but if the dependencies are not listed and the Essential tag is omitted, what actually goes wrong? It's one thing having a list of packages that can be omitted from the dependency list but having a tag in the control file (and Packages file) seems utterly pointless. With a little care, Essential is irrelevant. By all means keep a list of Essential packages but that list does not have to be derived from the package data or in the Packages file or need a package upload to modify; it could be somewhere in /etc/, making it easier to modify / ditch. The lack of the control field appears to have no ill effects, whether a list exists or not. Having the principle of Essential does mean that Emdebian can replace dpkg-divert and update-alternatives with shell scripts without having to change reverse dependencies but, in practice, it isn't that much of a gain. Anyway, the point of my comment was to avoid getting into that discussion again. I'm happy to ditch Essential when it gets in the way. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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