Why is sudo not installed by default in Debian? was closed as a duplicate. I believe this to be incorrect in that this question deals with a more subtle problem than the question it is marked a duplicate of. I am unable to find a button to vote to reopen. the reason that the other questions does not answer this one is that it assumes that lists are used to configure the preselected packages, which is true for all but a hand-full of cases, the most noticeable being sudo, which has behavior which is influenced by non package configuration options.