Jochen Sprickerhof wrote: > systemd recently dropped it's dependency on mount resulting in: > $ mmdebstrap --verbose --variant=essential --include=linux-image-generic > unstable /dev/null > [..] > dracut-install: ERROR: installing 'mount' > dracut-install: ERROR: installing 'umount'
The mount binary package has its Priority field set to Required, but it doesn't have Essential: yes. It is a well-known long-standing issue that Debian Policy doesn't distinguish these two clearly enough, but its language is clear (both in §3.5 a binary package's control fields, and also §6.5 about maintainer scripts), that the special permission to omit a package from Depends applies only to Essential ones. Furthermore, §2.5 generally expresses the intent that Priority be used to indicate a package's intrinsic importance to a user, and explicitly mentions that "transitive importance" is not recognized. For completeness, I mention that the description of Priority: required states that such a package is one that's required for the system's functioning and attempting removal can cause unbounded breakage. This seems more like a pragmatic warning, perhaps for the user who may not understand the package's function in their system, than a normative statement of the behavior being undefined. This also conflates most closely with the Essential package field, and doesn't reconcile its purpose with the Priority field being a hint to users rather than the package manager. Therefore that description seems weak. It wasn't obvious at first but it indeed looks like dracut needs to specify its requirement for mount.
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