[maemo-users] My N900 has diffmo as an essential package; safe to remove?

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+maemo at gmail.com> 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.

> 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.

(If this is not about /bin/diff, then I apologize for the confusion.)