What is an Essential, Required, Important, Standard, Optional, or Extra package?
Each Debian package is assigned a priority by the distribution maintainers, as an aid to the package management system. The priorities are: • Required: packages that are necessary for the proper functioning of the system. This includes all tools that are necessary to repair system defects. You must not remove these packages or your system may become totally broken and you may probably not even be able to use dpkg to put things back. Systems with only the Required packages are probably unusable, but they do have enough functionality to allow the sysadmin to boot and install more software. • Important packages should be found on any Unix-like system. Other packages which the system will not run well or be usable without will be here. This does NOT include Emacs or X or TeX or any other large applications. These packages only constitute the bare infrastructure. • Standard packages are standard on any Linux system, including a reasonably small but not too limited character-mode system. Too
