reopen 177952 found 177952 0.7.20.2+lenny1 fixed 177952 0.7.25.3 thanks The main point of these old bug reports is that there is no way of (willingly) preventing the installation of an essential package. In our present time we're confronting with the 'diff' -> 'diffutils' transition of an essential package. I have to keep "testing" in my sources.list file for a single 'noarch' package (PHP-based application) that I want to keep it updated. I have no reason to replace 'diff' with 'diffutils' because of this, so I'm looking for a solution of preventing an accidental install of 'diffutils' essential package.
> You can prevent the installation of new essential packages by > pinning them to -1: > > Package: test-essential > Pin: version 0.0-0 > Pin-Priority: -1 > > Thus I'm also closing bug #177952; because it is possible > to "suppress installation of essential packages". Due to > Bug #216768 this may not always work in practice; but I > have not checked it further. That's the thing, not even using "Pin-Priority: -1" for an essential package will prevent it from being installed. Either by executing "apt-get dist-upgrade" or "apt-get install diffutils" the new essential package is installed even if the pin priority is "-1". This bug seems fixed for 'squeeze' but not on 'lenny'. Does a fix for this qualifies for an update or will be tagged with lenny-ignore? Thanks -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org