About the base package:
======================

A long time ago, there was a package called `base', which was tagged
essential and contained a lot of things, among them all the special
device files in the /dev directory.

Currently, the device files do not belong to any particular package,
so the `base' package does not exist anymore, but if you upgraded your
system from a very early Debian release, it is possible that you still
have it installed (in this case it should not be removed!).

Having this package installed is harmless, but there are a few reasons
why you might want to have it uninstalled:

* dselect will show it as an "obsolete" package.
* The list of installed packages in the system will not match the
list of packages you would install when installing from scratch.

Therefore, you might want to get rid of it. In this case, here
is what you may do:

It is very important that you *don't* do "dpkg --purge base", because
this may remove all the conffiles for the base package listed in the
/var/lib/dpkg/status file. Here is a much safer method:

1. Make a backup of all your important files, in particular it is always
a good idea to have backups of all the files under /etc and /var/lib/dpkg.

2. Make sure you are not running a dselect session somewhere (if you can
enter dselect and then exit it is likely this is not the case).

3. Edit /var/lib/dpkg/status and remove all the items about the `base'
package. This has to be done with extreme care.

4. Remove all the files matching "/var/lib/dpkg/info/base.*".

To simplify this task (only 2. to 4., you still have to do the
backups!) and avoid mistakes, a simple shell script `remove-base' is
provided in the /usr/share/doc/base-files directory. It will modify the
status file and will remove the base.* files for you.

Warning: This script is provided in the hope that it will be useful
but without any warranty. Do not remove the `base' package if you are
not absolutely sure that you will not mess up your system.


Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>
