Chapter 2. The Debian Archive

9

non US

,

non US/contrib

or

non US/non free

if the package is in non US/main,

non US/contrib or non US/non free respectively.

The Debian archive maintainers provide the authoritative list of subsections. At present, they

are: admin, base, comm, contrib, devel, doc, editors, electronics, embedded, games, gnome, graphics,

hamradio, interpreters, kde, libs, libdevel, mail, math, misc, net, news, non US, non free, oldlibs, oth 

erosfs, perl, python, science, shells, sound, tex, text, utils, web, x11.

2.5 Priorities

Each package should have a priority value, which is included in the package's control record (see

`

Priority

' on page

31

). This information is used by the Debian package management tools

to separate high priority packages from less important packages.

The following priority levels are recognized by the Debian package management tools.

required

Packages which are necessary for the proper functioning of the system (usually,

this means that dpkg functionality depends on these packages). Removing an

required

package may cause your system to become totally broken and you may not even be

able to use

dpkg

to put things back, so only do so if you know what you are doing.

Systems with only the

required

packages are probably unusable, but they do have

enough functionality to allow the sysadmin to boot and install more software.

important

Important programs, including those which one would expect to find on any

Unix like system. If the expectation is that an experienced Unix person who found it

missing would say  What on earth is going on, where is

foo

? , it must be an

important

package.

2

Other packages without which the system will not run well or be usable must

also have priority

important

. This does not include Emacs, the X Window System, TeX

or any other large applications. The

important

packages are just a bare minimum of

commonly expected and necessary tools.

standard

These packages provide a reasonably small but not too limited character mode

system. This is what will be installed by default if the user doesn't select anything else.

It doesn't include many large applications.

optional

(In a sense everything that isn't required is optional, but that's not what is meant

here.) This is all the software that you might reasonably want to install if you didn't

know what it was and don't have specialized requirements. This is a much larger system

and includes the X Window System, a full TeX distribution, and many applications. Note

that optional packages should not conflict with each other.

extra

This contains all packages that conflict with others with required, important, standard

or optional priorities, or are only likely to be useful if you already know what they are or

have specialized requirements.

2

This is an important criterion because we are trying to produce, amongst other things, a free Unix.