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

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Marius Vollmer wrote:
> 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.

Yes, "diff" is essential in Debian.

It's not an essential in Maemo.


>> 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.

Default Busybox isn't built with "diff" utility (diff version in
Fremantle Busybox is too incompatible with real diff), so symlink
to that would be wrong.

If no package is depending on "diffmo", I think it's safe just to
remove it.


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


	- Eero