On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 03:08:32PM +0200, Andreas Henriksson wrote: > > > step 1: Switch from Essential: yes to Important: yes > > > > > > This will not be much of a change in practise. Higher level tools > > > like apt etc will still not want to uninstall the package, but > > > you can now uninstall it using dpkg without getting the > > > 'are you really sure you know what you're doing' question. > > > I'd say the most important difference is that according to > > > debian-policy (which doesn't know anything about Important: yes) > > > the package is now no longer Essential and thus other packages > > > are now allowed to add dependencies where needed. > > > > I think you mean "don't know anything about Required: yes" above, but > > No, AFAIK there's no such this as "Required: yes". Only > "Essential: yes" and (the newish) "Important: yes". > > I guess you're mixing this up with the "Priority: ..." field because > of the somewhat confusing naming.
Sorry, I meant to type "Priority: Required". We can do Essential: Yes / Priority: Required and I think that's safe. It's dropping Priority: down to Important is where things get interesting.... > > > > It's not just the builders; it will also be the Debian Docker image. > > I haven't checked, but I would assume the (normal) debian docker images > are built from a normal default debootstrap, which would include > "Priority: important" packages and thus e2fsprogs would still be there. The normal Debian Docker images uses --variant=minbase. So changing e2fsprogs from Priority: required to Priority: important **will** change the Docker image. Ref: https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/contrib/mkimage.sh > By making a package Essential: yes you (via debian-policy) forbit > packages to declare a dependency and thus the relationships between > packages can not easily be tracked. At the same time deinstalling an > Essential: yes package is just one additional step (answering one > additional confirmation question). I think you're entangling two different changes: 1) Essential: yes->no 2) Priority: required->important No? We can make the first change without the second. The first allows us packages to declare dependencies. The second shrinks the minbase size. And that's why I was asking the question what problem exactly that we being solved here. Since if it's just the dependency issue, we can change Essential to No. - Ted
