On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Eero Tamminen <eero.tamminen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > ext Marius Vollmer wrote: >> >> ext Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+maemo@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> >>> So I suppose I have two questions: >>> 1) What causes a package to become "essential"? >> >> The maintainer of that package has decided to make it essential and puts >> a "Essential: yes" field into debian/control. >> >> For Maemo, packages often become "essential" by accident when packaging >> bits are copied over from Debian. > > Yes, "diff" is essential in Debian. > > It's not an essential in Maemo. > > >>> 2) Is it actually safe to remove diffmo? I don't want an unbootable >>> device or anything bad like that. >> >> I assume that diffmo is a replacement for busybox /bin/diff. If so, >> then you only need to make sure that you always have a working >> /bin/diff. Thus, if after removing diffmo you end up without /bin/diff, >> repair that immediately, maybe by symlinking it to busybox, or by >> installing diffutils-gnu. > > Default Busybox isn't built with "diff" utility (diff version in > Fremantle Busybox is too incompatible with real diff), so symlink > to that would be wrong. > > If no package is depending on "diffmo", I think it's safe just to > remove it. Thanks Marius and Eero for your quick replies and good information. In fact, like Eero says, I did not have "diff" at all, symlink or otherwise. (That's why I was installing diffutils-gnu, and probably why I installed diffmo at some time in the past) I have safely removed diffmo and installed diffutils-gnu, with prefixed /usr/bin/gnu on my shell path and everything seems to work. Thanks again! _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
