portable APT? [LWN.net]

portable APT?

Posted Nov 24, 2025 16:53 UTC (Mon) by jmm (subscriber, #34596)
In reply to: portable APT? by atai
Parent article: APT Rust requirement raises questions

There's no strict dependency on apt in Debian, the whole discussion was totally blown out of proportion in the first place.
The ports w/o a Rust toolchain could still use cupt, which is written in C++.

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portable APT?

Posted Nov 26, 2025 14:01 UTC (Wed) by ATLief (subscriber, #166135) [Link] (3 responses)

The apt package is marked as "Essential: yes" and "Priority: required", so anything officially supported would need to include it. I guess those designations could be removed, but their intention is probably to ensure that packages can be installed on any system. I think having multiple lowest common denominators (like apt on most systems and cupt on others) would defeat the purpose of marking them as such.

portable APT?

Posted Nov 26, 2025 16:35 UTC (Wed) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link] (2 responses)

apt specifically isn't Essential, but it has a special case to treat itself as pseudo-Essential while making dependency calculations, to make sure you can't accidentally use apt to uninstall apt and then have no way to reinstall it. Non-apt package managers can uninstall it. (Try it in a minimal Debian container: "apt remove apt" fails unless you add some --force options, but "dpkg --remove apt" works fine, and presumably cupt would also allow removing it.)

Priority has very little practical effect, and Priority: required is mostly about ensuring that debootstrap and similar minimal-system bootstrap tools will install it, so that you have a route to install additional packages.

portable APT?

Posted Nov 26, 2025 17:01 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Or you use the gentoo approach with virtual packages - something like "Pid1 is essential, can be satisfied by SysV, systemd, OpenRC, yada yada".

So you can't uninstall the only one available from the list - if two are installed there's no problem uninstalling either.

Cheers,
Wol

Debian virtual packages

Posted Nov 27, 2025 16:59 UTC (Thu) by timon (subscriber, #152974) [Link]

Debian does have virtual packages [1], e. g. “xserver” [2]; those you cannot install but they are provided by other packages. Debian also has metapackages [3], e. g. “init” [4] corresponding to your Gentoo example; those you can actually install, and they will then pull in relevant dependencies providing the actual functionality. The “apt” package [5] however doesn’t provide any relevant virtual package name.

[1]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/virtual/
[2]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/xserver
[3]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/metapackages/
[4]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/init
[5]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/apt