protecting bricking Whonix / Whonix meta pacakges from removal using Essential: yes

[Patrick]

purpose:

Preventing bricking Whonix VMs on Debian dependency issues…

Such as the recent Debian dependency issues…

https://forums.whonix.org/uploads/default/original/2X/3/3f85f867828e6fb35e6aefcd7b00e4f8465fd85d.png

Thunderbird / enigmail no longer installed / sudo apt-get dist-upgrade - The following packages will be REMOVED: enigmail

This is happening on a Qubes debian-9 VM for me. So this could be a Debian issue. By extension, Whonix would be affected as well. user@debian-9:~$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: enigmail The following packages will be upgraded: ghostscript icedove libgs9 libgs9-common libmarkdown2 lightning thunderbird 7 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1…

Attempt:

Essential: yes

Desired goal:

apt-get will ask before package removal To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'.

Outcome:

Essential: yes however doesn’t work for that purpose. It results in installing package qubes-whonix-workstation on Qubes-Whonix-Gateway. Therefore I needed to git revert that commit.

[Patrick]

This was undone. Because when adding Whonix repository and then using a multi strap (“debootstrap”) (such as mmdebstrap) it would by default install all of these essential packages which actually conflict with each other.