portable APT? [LWN.net]

portable APT?

Posted Nov 26, 2025 14:01 UTC (Wed) by ATLief (subscriber, #166135)
In reply to: portable APT? by jmm
Parent article: APT Rust requirement raises questions

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.

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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