[Christian Perrier] > Peter Samuelson mentioned passwd being Essential because it depends > on passwd. This is actually right. However this dependency is just > the consequence of bash needing the add-shell and remove-shell > utilities...so, in the future, bash shouldn't depend on passwd > anymore.
Right, but the point is, *right now* both passwd and debianutils are Essential. This should prevent either from being removed from a running system - if debianutils Conflicts/Replaces an old passwd before the new passwd is in the archive, dpkg should refuse to upgrade to it. And, maybe I'm just dense, but your plan appears to have the same race condition, for new installs.
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