Hacker News Reader

I mean, isn't the point to remove the distinction? If you tell apt/dnf/zypper/apk/... to remove everything, then the thing that will stop you isn't the base OS being separate, it's that they mark the core packages as special and require you to force the matter. (And I agree with the other commenter that this should be done for pkg but that's why it's experimental right now)

View on HN

This would be learning from the prior experience of others.

In particular, learning why Debian has a system of marking some packages as "essential"; and learning why tools like aptitude, when told to resolve an intended change set up in the UI into specific package actions, will start doing that by switching off attempts to remove "essential" packages.

Note from the thread that there is an idea of marking packages as "vital", but it is not a concrete one yet.

I suspect that at least one of the numerous threads has sown seeds of confusion about the vital flag. Here's not the place to undo this … sorry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com