Re: Essentialness of awk
On Sat, 28 Sep 2002, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> immo vero scripsit:
>
> > This paragraph was added to fix Bug#50832 but if we follow it strictly
> > then all the awk packages are in violation, since they use the
> > alternative mechanism to update the awk symlink in /usr/awk and
> > therefore "do not provide their core functionality until they are
> > configured".
>
> I'd rather document awk to be an exception to the clause
> because unilaterally loosening this clause will require us
> to further patch the debootstrap phase.
What do you mean? You speak as if there were lots of essential
packages using the alternatives mechanism to provide the name of the
executable to be used. Are there so many?
> Debootstrap (the Debian installation system) special-cases awk, and
> creates a symlink.
AFAIK, what debootstrap does with awk should not be required anymore.
There was a problem in base-files when it gratuitously required awk to
be present in the initial install, but it was fixed in base-files_3.0.1.
What I mean is that the current policy wording about essential
packages is sub-optimal. The important thing is not that essential
packages work even if they are unconfigured, the important thing is
that once they are configured (by debootstrap) they should not be
unconfigured again.
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