Should foreign Priority: Required + Multi-Arch: same packages be installed by default with any foreign package?

[Scott Ritchie]

On 03/04/2012 09:26 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Sunday, March 04, 2012 08:02:48 PM Scott Ritchie wrote:
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine1.4/+bug/938310  is a bug
>> where Wine breaks because it doesn't have the i386 libncurses5, but only
>> on amd64.  libncurses5 has never been an explicit depends of Wine,
>> because it's always been on the system anyway - it wasn't until users
>> were installing i386 Wine on an amd64 system that it became possible to
>> not have the library.
>>
>>
>> I imagine there will be similar cases like this in the future, as a lot
>> of packages (correctly) assume that required packages are available.  I
>> believe even debhelper won't autogenerate dependencies on them.
>>
>>
>> So, I suggest:
>>  - If the user is installing a foreign arch package
>>  - and there are uninstalled priority:required packages for that arch
>>  - and these packages are also installed on the system
>>  - and these packages are marked multi-arch: same
>>
>> Then they should be treated as Recommends and installed automatically.
>>
>> Thoughts?  Too late to do this for Precise?
> 
> libncurses5 is not essential, so it seems like a simple case of missing 
> depends.  Making the assumption that transitive dependency resolution will 
> bring in packages your package needs via another package depends is a bug.
> 
> Scott K
> 

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting the Debian Policy for Priority: Required
packages.  Why does that category even exist if we also have the
Essential tag?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie