Hi, David: On Monday 02 November 2009 16:40:00 David Kalnischkies wrote: > Hi all,
[...] > > The "real" bug here showed by diff (and a few other before) > is therefore something like this: > New essential package A replaces old essential package B. > (Package B is now a transitional package to A.) > The user (with mixed sources) tries to deinstall package B and > apt refuses that as it thinks B is essential - it doesn't take into > account that A provides the same functionality as B. > > Could we agree on that it is a (very) minor bug? No. At least not a package bug. Your very reasonement about why all essential packages are tried to be installed works here too: you have packages from versions N and N+1 where packages on N depend on essential "foo" and those on N+1 depend on the new essential "bar" which overrides "foo". Then you can't gratuitously assume that even if "bar" is functionally-wise the same as "foo" versions on N will in fact be able to work with "bar": you don't know how many or how deep changes where needed on N versions to make them work nicely with "bar" as they go N+1 (which it's, in fact, the main function of the very distribution effort: manage to get a disparaged bunch of packages to smoothly work together). So I don't think that's a bug but an unsupported corner-case. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org