On Thu, 1 Apr 2010, Teodor MICU wrote: > 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.
Please note that the upgrade path from diff to diffutils does not take in account at all the apt-get feature of "installing essential packages automatically without asking and without warning at all", so in squeeze there is a dummy diff package which depends on diffutils. Does this echo diff hold | dpkg --set-selections improve things in your system? Note: No, I'm not going to drop the dummy diff "because apt-get already cares about new essential packages". A dummy package is required to prevent a time window in which /usr/bin/diff would be unavailable otherwise, as explained in Bug#563895. BTW: Yet another reason why I think apt does the wrong thing: By installing essential packages automatically, we are sending the wrong message to developers, namely, that we don't "need" transition packages to rename essential packages as apt-get already cares about that. That's not true. We need them. Would apt authors please consider documenting the current behaviour at least? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
