Hi. On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 11:08:22AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: > I asked on IRC, and got this answer: > > The archive (Packages) and individual .debs can disagree on Priority. It's > mostly a field that has no meaning these days. > > I'm not 100% sure how to interpret that. Are different mirrors giving > out different Packages files with different Priority settings?
Now that you mention it - [1]. A mirror can override a package priority, that's true. I don't know if http://ftp.debian.org/debian/indices/ is mirrored too, along with the usual Release files and *debs. It can explain this discrepancy if it's true. The question is - which Priority goes into the package database on package install? That one from the package itself, or the one from the mirror? > Someone who's affected by the missing capabilities on ping might want > to investigate more closely, or add some info to bug #780721. Adrian > talked about libcap2-bin being changed to "Priotity: important" at some > point in the future (relative to 2016), so maybe that has already happened. It sure did not happen here. > I'm not sure how to *find out* whether that has happened, since we can't > even figure out how to view the actual Priority. Or, if the Priority > "mostly ... has no meaning", then whatever was stopping Adrian from acting > in 2016 might no longer be a roadblock. In the context of the original deboostrap behaviour - it's simple. debootstrap installs barebones to produce a working apt, and uses it to install the rest of the packages. apt trusts the mirror (it would be counterproductive to download and analyze every package just to extract their Priority and Depends), hence mirror's priority wins here. Reco [1] https://wiki.debian.org/FtpMaster/Override
