Bug#472551: gnome-applets-data *requires* mktemp for postinst

[Tom Parker]

2008/4/23 Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org>:
>  mktemp *is* essential, so things should just work without a dependency.
>
>  Could you sum up how when you installed your system and how you upgraded
>  it?

Installed from Etch 4.0r2 DVDs a little while back. Using a mix of
stable,testing,unstable and experimental packages. Been upgrading with
aptitude mostly, and as I've just noticed (using aptitude 0.4.11.1-1
to uninstall mktemp) it will let you quite happily uninstall Essential
packages without so much as a "are you really sure you want to do
this?". The console output says:

dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
 This is an essential package - it should not be removed.
(Reading database ... 115481 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing mktemp ...

but, if you're changing lots of stuff at once that's easy to miss and
there wasn't any prompt (beyond the standard stuff, and nothing to
indicate you were removing something vital)

BTW, got confused because I just saw the "Priority: required" and not
the "Essential: yes" field and so didn't realise that "Essential" was
a separate field in its own right.

Tom