* Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> [100314 20:54]:
> >> 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?
>
> The user removes the package and breaks their system.

The problem is that Essential has three aspects:

1) Avoid people breaking their system
by deinstalling the wrong parts.

2) Specifying a base set of functionality always available
(with all those working if only unpacked...)

3) Reducing dependencies of other packages.

The problem is that 1 and 2 are not exactly the same, and while 3
is a logical choice with 2, it is also done for 1.

While removing mount or the pam stack from a stand-alone system is usually
not a good idea, treating 1 and 2 the same means it hast to be installed in
every chroot[1]. This increases minimal build chroot sizes massively for
many simple packages. (And reducing it needs manual looking and testing
to make sure which parts are needed and which not, as there are no
dependencies).

Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link

[1] Well, in practise you often need pam, because many packages need
util-linux for some parts of the package, while other parts of the package
need libuuid1 which needs passwd which needs pam, but that is another thing.


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On 14/03/2010 19:25, Steve Langasek 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 have seen strange side-effects of Essential, especially when using
multiple (pinned) sources (esp. stable+testing+unstable).

Example is mktemp and diff which are (according to the tool I use for
upgrade) regularly proposed for deinstallation and then proposed for
reinstallation.

Not that it is a big problem, tough.
--
Jean-Christophe Dubacq


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