2010/4/29 Matt Taggart <tagg...@debian.org>:
> Can you think of another way that apticron could determine if things are
> needed?
That is the point: We disagree here if the listed packages are need or not.
In a complete upgraded stable from oldstable the old essentials are not
needed so they can be removed which apt just forbids because of the
oldstable archive still in the sources - if the sources entry is gone the
packages can also go.
In a system which is mostly stable with a few unstable packages you
have a) essentials which are only essentials in stable: You need these
as your packages from stable implicit depend on them, but you need
also b) the essentials from unstable as your packages from unstable
depend on them implicitly. Just imagine an unstable package needs
dash to function correctly: Normally it would have a Depends on dash,
but as dash is in unstable an essential package it will NOT have a
dependency on dash - it will just assume that dash is installed.
So my take is that these packages apticron lists here are needed -
you have until now just enough luck that your system works without
them as no unstable package made use of dash but the next install
could change that… (or even remove as the dash dependency could
be also in a {pre,post}rm script… - pre as essentials work also in
unpack state and are never uninstalled).
The fact that it is a bit unlikely that your system will break next time
is just that most new-essentials are renamed old-essentials or are
e.g. in the case of dash essential as a shell but not really used by
a package itself -- but you can never be sure…
Best regards,
David Kalnischkies
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