Owen Heisler writes:
> Still, I was thinking more of packages like "login" that could surely be
> considered "essential" for 99% of Debian systems out there, along with
> the common frontends to apt for package management, like aptitude and
> dselect, so other packages can be installed using the preferred program.
Packages that are considered absolutely essential are tagged 'essential'
and dpkg will refuse to remove them. 'login' is 'essential'.
Packages in section 'base' form the minimum set required to run the package
management system and install packages. Not all 'base' packages are
'essential' or 'required' as packages such as ppp which not all users will
need are in 'base'.
Priorities are:
required
Packages which are necessary for the proper functioning of the
system (usually, this means that dpkg functionality depends on
these packages). Removing an required package may cause your
system to become totally broken and you may not even be able to
use dpkg to put things back, so only do so if you know what you
are doing. Systems with only the required packages are probably
unusable, but they do have enough functionality to allow the
sysadmin to boot and install more software.
important
Important programs, including those which one would expect to
find on any Unix-like system. If the expectation is that an
experienced Unix person who found it missing would say "What on
earth is going on, where is foo?", it must be an important
package.[4] Other packages without which the system will not run
well or be usable must also have priority important. This does
not include Emacs, the X Window System, TeX or any other large
applications. The important packages are just a bare minimum of
commonly-expected and necessary tools.
standard
These packages provide a reasonably small but not too limited
character-mode system. This is what will be installed by default
if the user doesn't select anything else. It doesn't include
many large applications.
optional
(In a sense everything that isn't required is optional, but
that's not what is meant here.) This is all the software that
you might reasonably want to install if you didn't know what it
was and don't have specialized requirements. This is a much
larger system and includes the X Window System, a full TeX
distribution, and many applications. Note that optional packages
should not conflict with each other.
extra
This contains all packages that conflict with others with
required, important, standard or optional priorities, or are
only likely to be useful if you already know what they are or
have specialized requirements.
--
John Hasler
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