* Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [080605 19:04]: > This is not part of the rationale for a package's inclusion in Essential, > it's an effect of a package's inclusion in Essential. > > Packages should only be in the Essential set if they have to be there to > guarantee the operation of dpkg.
I've experimented recently with some more minimal build chroots (even dropping some essential stuff), and I do not think that above matches the current situation. I think currently it is more of "if they have to be there to garantee a working system". Things like passws, sysvinit, mount, e2fsprogs, sysvinit-utils, libpam-modules or login are as far as I can tell not needed at all to have dpkg functionally, but as far as I can guess are only essential because removing them would bring a non-chroot system easily in an unusable state. (Surprisingly many things even still work without util-linux, though splitting it into a mkfs*/fsck* part (which needs the libuuid1 dependency which again pulls in passwd, which again pulls in more stuff) in an extra package seems a more sensible choice if things were to change in a way to allow more minimal build chroots). Hochachtungsvoll, Bernhard R. Link -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]