On 8 Sep 1996, Kai Henningsen wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Guy Maor) wrote on 05.09.96 in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > Is the essentialness of a package a sufficient condition for using > > pre-depends? > > The difference in functionality between depends and pre-depends, as I > understand it, are that a pre-depends guarantees that your package won't > even be *unpacked* unless the pre-depends is already completely installed. > On the other hand, a depends only guarantees that the other package will > be completely installed before *configuration* of your package starts.
That's correct. Pre-depends and essentialness are different things. The first prevents a package from existing in an unconfigured state (when dependencies might not be satisfied). The second prevents a package from being removed. In both cases the intent is the same: there should *always* be a working version of the package installed. So very few packages should have one without the other. A quick script gives: adduser ess but not pre-dep and has dep at pre-dep but not ess libc5 pre-dep but not ess modules pre-dep but not ess ncurses3.0 ess but not pre-dep and has dep perl pre-dep but not ess All but two of these should have both or neither. The only that look correct are perl, because base includes a stripped version, and libc5, which requires a working ld.so, but might be removed in favor of libc6. Note that packages in base are *not* automatically essential. The key point here is that the system is unusable, not hard to use. Guy
