Bug#756023: init: Please drop Essential:yes from init metapackage

Jan Braun janbraun at gmx.net
Wed Aug 27 17:21:41 BST 2014


Hi,
since init with essential:yes entered testing recently, I had a surprise
when apt-get on my STABLE system today suddenly wanted to install
systemd and dependencies[1][2].

Reason being that I had both stable and testing lines in my sources.list
and apt-pinning set up to prefer stable (and no testing packages
actually installed). apt-get considers an essential:yes package in any
suite to be essential for the complete system. See #216768, which
explains to my satisfaction how that is the most correct, if surprising,
behaviour.[3]

I think that would have been a good reason to keep sysvinit the
essential:yes package, even if it no longer contained System V init.
Of course, that may be irrelevant by now.


I don't necessarily have a point, just wanted to document that
experience for consideration by those manipulating essential:yes
packages.

regards,
    Jan

[1]
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libaudit0 libsystemd-daemon0 libsystemd-id128-0 libsystemd-journal0 systemd
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/1547 kB of archives.
After this operation, 3943 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? ^C

Even now, I don't understand this completely, as neither init nor
systemd-sysv were going to be installed...

[2]
My own debugging was not helped by the coincidence of DSA-3012-1 updating
eglibc at the same time. Thanks to #debian-systemd for helping me
figuring out what was going on.

[3]
It's worth noting that aptitude seems to disagree and would not install
systemd.
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