Bug#282278: apt mixes essential flag from all sources
unmerge 282278
retitle 282278 apt mixes essential flag from all sources for "apt-get remove"
tags 282278 - wontfix
severity 282278 normal
thanks
Explanations below. In short: unmerge because the context is different
for "apt-get dist-upgrade" and "apt-get remove", retitle to make this
clear, removed wontfix that was added for "apt-get dist-upgrade",
severity downgraded to normal (would also be minor) because this is
just a confusing (incorrect) warning message.
On 2011-10-17 03:01:54 -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>
> > I disagree about the wontfix. You need to look at all the other merged
> > bugs, in particular bug 282278, which is about a confusing warning
> > message.
>
> For reference:
>
> Description: The GNU shell programming utilities (transitional package)
> Empty package to facilitate upgrades, can be safely removed.
>
> # apt-get remove --purge shellutils textutils
> [...]
> WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed
> This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
>
> That was a bug in the package descriptions of the transitional
> packages. A transitional package that is used to satisfy versioned
> dependencies should say something like "This is a dummy package to
> satisfy dependencies on foo using its old name. It can safely be
> removed if no other package depends on it."
This is another problem, specific to dummy packages, and not related
to essential packages (it is worse to remove essential packages, but
this is not what triggered the warning here).
Note: if an essential package will be removed due to a dependency,
the warning should be triggered because of the attempt to remove
this essential package. But this is *not* the case of this warning
here.
> The transitional package shellutils was in a similar situation:
>
> Empty package to facilitate upgrades. The essential functionality
> previously provided by shellutils is part of the coreutils package
> now; this package exists to satisfy dependencies (including the
> implicit dependency by all packages in etch) on the old name and
> can be safely removed if no package depends on it.
>
> However, it's possible the warning when removing a package that is
> considered essential for this reason and that lacks the Essential: yes
> flag should be reworded to make this clearer. If you have ideas for
> that, please unmerge bug 282278 so it can happen.
shellutils wasn't lacking "Essential: yes". This shellutils package
had
Pre-Depends: coreutils
So, once shellutils had moved to a dummy package, the coreutils
version with "Essential: yes" was necessarily installed. And
there was no risk to remove shellutils concerning essential
packages (I mean, removing shellutils would never have removed
coreutils automatically: that was shellutils that (pre-)depended
on coreutils, not the opposite).
The warning was triggered here just because (according to what was
said) I had something like:
deb ... stable main contrib non-free
in my /etc/apt/sources.list file, and that the shellutils version
from Debian/stable had "Essential: yes". But what is wrong is that
the version that was currently installed (and was requested to be
removed) was from testing or unstable, and it was not essential.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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