Package: diffoscope Version: 161 Severity: important File: diffoscope Dear Maintainer,
The size of diffoscope is getting really quite ridiculous, all the recommends now come to ~2.6 GB installed size, even though they are not used in the vast majority of use cases. Not only is the disk space wasted, the extra packages causes APT maintenance headaches when upgrading, it often wants to install random extra dependencies not necessarily caused by diffoscope itself, but an upgrade to one of its recommends. Sometimes the grandchildren provides of the child recommends interact badly, for example on my system installing diffoscope wants to install evince and gnome3-desktop-data for some reason, even though I already have another PDF viewer installed. Debian Policy says: "Recommends: This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency." and that is why apt-get installs these by default. However most of the current Recommends are for rare use cases. Furthermore diffoscope already has very nice run-time logic to detect when a needed program is not installed, and tells you to install it. I have managed to figure out that by moving the following Recommends to Suggests one can cut the footprint from 2.6GB to about 64MB which is much more reasonable. Therefore please do that. These are ordered roughly by size: - ghc - 800MB - ocaml-nox - 460MB - llvm - 330MB - fp-utils - 320MB - default-jdk-headless | default-jdk | java-sdk - 240MB for default-jdk-headless - python3-guestfs - 150MB - python3-binwalk - 140MB - gnumeric - 85MB - apktool - 50MB - mono-utils - 30MB - radare2 - 30MB - xmlbeans - 20MB - ovmf - 14MB This will make it much easier to keep having diffoscope on a system across multiple system upgrades. X -- System Information: Debian Release: bullseye/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'buildd-unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (300, 'unstable'), (200, 'experimental'), (1, 'buildd-experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 5.6.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled
