Glenn McGrath wrote: > I think we should be reduceing the number of required packages, not > increasing them.
You should consider the current dpkg/dselect status in sarge as the first step of a two-step process. The purpose of the split is to increase (in the long run) the freedom of dpkg/dselect users. In the long run, people will be able to install dpkg and not dselect. This is a freedom current dpkg/dselect users do not have (unless they rm dselect manually, which would be a system abuse). Since the sum of dpkg+dselect packages are the equivalent of the previous dpkg package, it may be true that there is now one more required package, but since the code is the same as before, it's not a *real* increase. Think about the current (incomplete) split as the step that will make the second step possible (namely, when dpkg will no longer depend on dselect, and dselect will stop being essential de-facto).