On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 at 18:46, Niko Tyni <nt...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 03:26:02PM +0100, Dimitri John Ledkov wrote: > > Package: perl-base > > Version: 5.30.3-4 > > Severity: normal > > > > Dear Maintainer, > > > > usrmerge will be needed to be installed upon upgrades to bookworm to > > convert systems to merged /usr. It would be helpful for small installs > > to be able to perform that without installing the larger perl package. > > Thanks for raising this early. I'm copying the usrmerge maintainer. > > > Please consider moving things that usrmerge & libfile-find-rule-perl > > use from per/perl-modules to perl-base. > > I understand the concern, but I'm hesitant to do this. See below. > > > In bookworm+1 you may drop these things from perl-base and add breaks > > on usrmerge. > > Quoting the Debian policy: > > Maintainers should take great care in adding any programs, interfaces, > or functionality to essential packages. Packages may assume that > functionality provided by essential packages is always available without > declaring explicit dependencies, which means that removing functionality > from the Essential set is very difficult and is almost never done. Any > capability added to an essential package therefore creates an obligation > to support that capability as part of the Essential set in perpetuity. >
How about splitting perl-modules and have perl-modules & perl-modules-bits-and-pieces which will not be essential; perl-modules will depend on; but also usrmerge will be able to depend on "perl-base, perl-modules-bits-and-pieces | perl-modules" ? And later it will be able to collapse back into perl-modules. > Have other avenues been investigated? How critical is the > libfile-find-rule-perl dependency - would it be hard to replace it with > something that's already in the Essential set, for instance piping from > find(1) ? Could autodie usage be replaced with explicit error handling? > In Ubuntu, a choice was made to simply vendor copies of the needed modules in the usrmerge package to reduce its dependencies. I'm not advocating for Debian to make a similar choice. > Is Perl the right language to implement the migration in the first > place? A small binary with minimal external dependencies would seem > preferable. Yes it is the right language. The implementation is concise and correct, and it is tricky to get right. -- Regards, Dimitri.
