Re: [RFC] The GNU system's package system

[Richard Stallman]

In case I didn't make it clear before, part of my idea is that
package dependencies work very differently from the way they do
in Debian.  Instead of controlling which packages *to* install,
they control whether installation takes effect.  A package
that lacks some dependencies is effectively not installed.

The user can override this by deleting the file in the package
that says what it depends on.  Then it will have no dependencies,
so it will be installed for real.

There's no reason we cannot use the same dependencies apt-get style to
decide which packages to fetch and install.