On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 08:44:13AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
First I'm looking comparison of required, important, standard, optional, and extra as package labels [particularly interested in corner cases]. I've been looking at [https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/]. I'm not grasping something. Not sure what ;/
Well, it's hard to answer questions when you don't ask a question. For the most part the priorities don't matter much, and are largely a historical curiosity. Extra is gone, standard and important don't mean much. So most packages are optional, and a few that should be really hard to remove are required. Being required has the possible advantage that other packages don't need to explicitly list dependencies on the required package (but in practice you usually end up with a versioned libc6 dependency anyway). It does save a bit on the overhead of every single package having dependencies on /bin/sh and coreutils that the dependency resolver would then have to consider.
Mike Stone
