admin should at least see a warning once for new required packages not installed on the system, even if they've removed the metapackages

If you problem still exists, please submit a new bug report with more details.

Thank you.

Why submit a new one when this one is perfectly fine?

Robert, the way you are doing bug triaging is not helping ubuntu. There is too much to say, but one general principle I want to point out and that is "ask first and only act when things are properly understood (or there is no reaction)". OK?

Woah! Bad first triaging attempt!

Rolf, was this after a dist-upgrade (eg, hardy --> intrepid) that you found your system unbootable? Did you use the update manager (do-release-upgrade) to upgrade?

It's been a while, but I am sure, it would be relatively easy to reproduce this problem anytime. Let me first say that I understand this may not be what some consider a bug. After all, I removed ubuntu-minimal and some would argue that I am on my own after that. OK, understood. The problem is that ubuntu-minimal is not so minimal. I believe we should expend some energy to make ubuntu behave better even under such circumstances.

Here is what I believe to have happened. I have a vserver in a remote data center for some years now. Admin is done completely over ssh, there is no X. Space was at a premium and ubuntu-minimal pulled in several hundred MB of packages I did not really need (I believe hardware-detection was a big "offender"). I started out with a dapper install provided by the data center. I am almost sure I upgraded it all the way to gutsy. The tool I use for that is plain aptitude. The vserver ran fine all the time for several months and no reboot was necessary.

Some time in the past, ubuntu switched from sysvinit to upstart. I believe sysvinit was removed at some point. ubuntu-minimal which was supposed to pull in upstart was not installed, so that did not happen. The vserver of course continued to run just fine for several more months. Until that day when the datacenter had to reboot the real server and my vserver did not come back up because it was missing the startup scripts.

well, maybe it really is as the title says "required packages are not installed by default as they become available". Deinstalling required packages has big warnings. Maybe the admin should at least see a warning once for new required packages not installed on the system.

I'll defer this one to mvo, but I'm fairly sure he'll say no. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot by removing required packages, it'll let you.

Persistant warnings for stuff that you don't want to be installed, but are now required, could get *very* annoying....

It's not that I want to shoot myself in the foot intentionally, but ubuntu-minimal just isn't so minimal.

Sarah, I said they should see a warning "once". Their decision for package X could be saved somewhere so as not to bother them again.

We have Essential: yes for packages which must always be installed.

Well, there still is no warning on upgrade or any other way to make sure that Essential packages are installed (other than ubuntu-minimal, I guess). The reason I keep on insisting on this is that I was forced to remove ubuntu-minimal as it was pulling in either too many packages or some packages that were creating a problem for my 1GB vserver. On upgrading the system to the next release it became unbootable.

I think this one should be reasonably easy to fix. Why give up with Ubuntu on more minimal installations?

APT automatically ensures that all packages with Essential: yes are installed on a dist-upgrade. Other packages are not required to be installed. There are many types of systems, and APT cannot know which things you need for your system. For example, you do not need LVM on a system without LVM volumes.

If packages change, than this is a problem with those packages. For example, when transitioning from sysvinit to upstart, there must be sysvinit dummy packages depending on upstart, to ensure that the upgrade works using apt.

In summary: It's not APT's job to keep your system running.