Package: equivs Version: 2.1.0 Severity: normal Hi! If the control file includes an Essential flag (or not-yet-official Important), such flags are silently ignored. I'd expect them to be copied to the new package, or at least an error or warning.
Beside testing, Essential dummy packages are useful in case when some package managers insist on removing packages because of an arch:any/all version mismatch, or even because of a bogus Recommends that conflicts with an equivs package. It'd be better to "apt-mark hold" the equivs package, but handling of holds tends to be buggy. For example, the following equivs-control (commented-out lines removed): .---- Section: misc Priority: optional Standards-Version: 3.9.2 Package: foo Essential: yes Description: test of essential packages blah blah `---- produces a package with: .---- Package: foo Version: 1.0 Architecture: all Maintainer: Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> Installed-Size: 9 Section: misc Priority: optional Multi-Arch: foreign Description: test of essential packages blah blah `---- Meow! -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers unstable-debug APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (150, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.13.0-rc3-debug-00026-g0172821546b5 (SMP w/6 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) Versions of packages equivs depends on: ii debhelper 10.7 ii dpkg-dev 1.18.24 ii fakeroot 1.21-3.1 ii make 4.1-9.1 ii perl 5.26.0-4 equivs recommends no packages. equivs suggests no packages. -- no debconf information
