I am using pkgsrc as a complete operating system, in other words, it
provides a kernel, glibc (and other libs), gcc, binutils, important shell
utils, tar (or alternative), ftp client, et cetera.

Can anyone share an ideas, experiences or examples of other operating
system packaging tools for preventing accidental removal of important
packages?

For example, pkg_add may need tar, maybe gzip libs, maybe ftp, and maybe
some basic shell utils.

I guess a few packages could use some identifier indicating that they
should never be permanently removed, but only updated.

In my particular case, I could have some .mk definition to set
DEPENDS+= to a few packages to apply for all packages. That way deleting
sh-utils (for example) couldn't be removed until all other packages were
removed first -- which would become impossible.

So then how to update sh-utils in this case?

I guess I should also look at the syspkg tools to see what it does to
prevent accidental removal of /bin/cat or /bin/sh for example.

Any ideas or pointers would be appriciated.

Thank you,

   Jeremy C. Reed

   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/