David Kalnischkies wrote: > In that case what means 'other suite' here? It is just 'not the currently > installed suite for perl-base'? But this tells us nothing [...] > In all but the last case changing the message is just plain wrong.
Maybe it is enough to change the message unconditionally, then. It currently says "WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed". A person can easily get confused by running "dpkg -s <package>" and finding the "Essential: yes" flag is not there. Maybe something like WARNING: The following packages which are essential in some suite will be removed would avoid that confusion. I agree with you that "Essential: yes" is technically something like an implied Pre-Depends from all packages and that this means the Essential flag on the installed version of a package is not actually relevant. But as the 7 or so bugs this used to be merged with illustrate, that's not necessarily obvious when people first run into it. :) Therefore in an ideal world it would be nice to do WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed fileutils (essential in sarge) textutils (essential in sarge) This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing! I was thinking that an approximation would be to put "some other suite" instead of "sarge" to at least get the reader thinking along the right lines; this wouldn't need to involve changing the cache format since this message does not need to be shown very often so it can be slow. I guess even better would be to keep a list of the sources that caused a package to be considered essential somewhere. That is a bit beyond my depth, unfortunately. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
