Dear Maintainer,

Protection is applied to foreign-arch packages (e.g. libgcc-s1:i386 on
amd64) even though they aren't relevant to the scenarios that
protection is designed to prevent (as I understand it):

Would it be possible for removal of such packages not to require
--force-remove-protected, at least if the corresponding native arch
package is installed? The latter check isn't useful with libraries
(where, if nothing depends on them, we can be certain that they are
not needed for the system to boot), but would catch situations where
e.g. the system's init is not the native package. (I imagine there's a
better approach to this.)

Regards,

Stephen

Hi!

Right, AFAIR this was a workaround used to try to help apt with an
upgrade scenario where otherwise it was unable to cope well with the
libgcc1 to libgcc-s1 transition.

In principle shared libraries should never be marked Essential:yes nor
Protected:yes, I think this was a special case, that will go away once
the shared library gets the Protected filed dropped after the
transition is over.

I think at least the description for the field in dpkg(1), deb-control(5)
and probably «/usr/share/doc/dpkg/protected-field.txt» should be made more
clear. I'll try to prepare a patch for this today.


And while I think in this specific case that you mention, the heuristic
that you propose might make sense. I'm not sure that is generalizable
or can be encoded in a neutral way in dpkg itself. As I don't think it
would be appropriate for dpkg to assume that all Mulit-Arch:same packages
are going to be shared libraries, or say encode specific package name
patterns or even assumed semantics out of section names.

Thanks,
Guillem

Hi Guillem,

Ah right, that’s good to know, thanks! It seems libcrypt1 is protected for
upgrade reasons too.

Excellent!

Right, I didn’t have the latter in mind; I was hoping that a heuristic like
“when removing foo:foreign, if foo:native is installed then ignore the
protected field” would work, without considering foo’s section etc.

Regards,

Stephen

Hi!

I've got the attached, although it would probably not have been enough.
But I'm a bit hesitant to mention the workaround case, as don't feel
it's supposed to be used that way, and it looks more like an exception
than something proper. But then, if people find these cases, then not
mentioning it might be more confusing, so hmmm.

If I had to mention that I'd perhaps add something like these lines:

  other uses ", and in some very special circumstances it might be
  used as a workaround to help with upgrade scenarios that front-ends
  might not be able to resolve in some other more proper way"

but, not sure.

Thanks,
Guillem

Hi!

Bug #1008780 in package dpkg reported by you has been fixed in
the dpkg/dpkg.git Git repository. You can see the changelog below, and
you can check the diff of the fix at:

https://git.dpkg.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/diff/?id=becfa57b3
---
man: Expand Protected and Essential field use cases

Closes: #1008780

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
dpkg, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1008780@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> (supplier of updated dpkg package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2022 11:25:58 +0200
Source: dpkg
Architecture: source
Version: 1.21.9
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Dpkg Developers <debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org>
Changed-By: Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>
Closes: 1008780 1011510 1012195
Changes:
 dpkg (1.21.9) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   [ Guillem Jover ]
   * dpkg-deb: Add support for --threads-max and DPKG_DEB_THREADS_MAX.
     Prompted by vv221 on IRC.
   * Perl modules:
     - Dpkg::Source::Package::V2: Always fix the permissions for upstream
       tarballs. Closes: #1012195
     - Dpkg::BuildFlags: Document optimize feature area.
   * Documentation:
     - man: Clarify that statoverrides do not need to be known to dpkg.
       Closes: #1011510
     - man: Expand Protected and Essential field use cases. Closes: #1008780
     - doc: Rename frontend.txt to frontend-api.txt.
     - doc: Move specifications under doc/spec.
     - man: Add references to rootless-builds.txt spec.
   * Code internals:
     - libdpkg: Refactor command actions for compression.
   * Build system:
     - Split the test-runner into its own script.
 .
   [ Helge Kreutzmann ]
   * Localization:
     - Update German man pages translation.
     - Update German scripts translation.
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