Once again I spent a lot of time with the debian package system. It seems to be impossible to remove an essential package although dpkg offers an option. When I am issuing the command
dpkg --force-remove-essential perl-base only a help message is displayed. This is frustrating since dpkg --force-help displays the command as valid. I am not able to install a lot of important packages since I have to replace perl-base v. 5.004 with v. 5.005 and the 5.004 perl with the newest one. I am stuck again with a debian package problem. These problems are consuming most of the time for administering the system (my next system will be slackware). Werner