On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 06:00:45PM +0100, Sven Joachim wrote: > In response to #774910, grub-common gained a dependency on mtools, but I > do not think this makes much sense. Creating a rescue disk with > grub-mkrescue also requires xorriso, so the dependency on mtools alone > is useless. > > Personally I rely on third party rescue systems like GRML and do not use > grub-mkrescue at all, so I think mtools should be demoted to Suggests, > like xorriso. Having both in Recommends might sense as well, but a hard > dependency looks excessive.
On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 01:18:55PM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote: > I agree; I think it'd be perfectly reasonable to have Recommends on both > mtools and xorriso, but a hard dependency suggests that grub can't work > without them. grub works fine without either mtools or xorriso > installed; one utility, grub-mkrescue, doesn't. There's plenty of > precedent in other packages, especially common packages that many people > will have installed, for using Recommends for packages needed by one of > many scripts within a package. These are reasonable points, given that grub-common is installed nearly everywhere and grub-mkrescue is not so frequently used. I think what I'll do is drop mtools to Suggests alongside the existing xorriso, but add a note to the package description indicating that grub-mkrescue needs those packages (with a UEFI caveat in the case of mtools). This is still more of a package relationship than existed before I dealt with #774910, and means that a simple "apt show" will explain the situation. If the two opposing requirements remain in tension after that, then I think the way out is likely to be a separate binary package called something like grub-tools or grub-utils that can hold things like grub-mkrescue and grub-mkstandalone. However, it's too late in the bullseye release cycle for that option to be available just at the moment. -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
