[wellylug] OpenOffice 1.1.1

[Sam Cannell]

Jamie and David have pretty much summed up what I would have said.  The
main issue here is that you told Debian to remove a package, didn't pay
enough attention to the messages you were given, and were then surprised
when things fell over.

Imho, the mail command should exist on any distribution.  Heaps of
packages use it, and given the messages attached to the bug report that
caused the added mailx dependancy on the postgres package
(http://bugs.debian.org/172689), it seems that not all of them have the
dependancy listed.

If there's any fault with Debian here, it's that the mailx package isn't
marked as being an essential component of the OS like dpkg, libc6, apt
and such are, which give a much more ominous warning when you try to
remove them:

sam at arilou:~$ sudo apt-get remove apt
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  apt apt-utils aptitude base-config gnome synaptic
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
  apt
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 12.1MB disk space will be freed.
You are about to do something potentially harmful
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
 ?]

On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 15:10, andrej at paradise.net.nz wrote:
> What I'm trying to get at is that it's not
> a requireoment of the product but introduced
> by a package maintainer person.
-- 
Sam Cannell <sam at plaz.net.nz>
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