Hello Helmut, Thanks for your interest in completing this task.
On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 01:03:05AM +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote: > Hi, > > I want make fdisk removable from an essential base system. The details > are listed in #947134. Since fdisk currently is pseudo-essential, > packages do not need to declare a dependency on it. When fdisk becomes > non-essential, such dependencies become required. A lot of packages that > use fdisk have since added the relevant dependency (see `apt rdepends > fdisk`). To fix the remaining packages, I intend to perform a mass bug > filing. AIUI ubuntu will need to keep this dependency until they release 20.04 (their next LTS?) for proper upgrades between LTS->LTS which I've been told they support. I'm not sure about their release procedure, so this might already be a done deal and there's no chance your changes will be imported into ubuntu before then anyway. I just thought I'd mention it and say that you might want to reach out and make sure someone on their side is aware. > > I intend to use the following text as a mail template. [...] > Please find a dd-list of affected packages attached. There are only 33 > binary packages left. In the absence of a discussion, I intend to file > the bugs in early January. I'll review the list at that time for added > dependencies. FYI ganeti #872131 libguestfs #872101 opensvc #872208 partimage #872107 python-diskimage-builder #872128 qemu #872098 salt #872099 sosreport #872215 vmdebootstrap #872137 waagent #872113 weresync #872103 More reports have been filed and some might have been reassigned to a different package since, so please also see: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?submitter=andr...@fatal.se&include=subject%3Afdisk&archive=both Likely some new packages have appeared since I did my bug filing. I also skipped filing some bug reports where my analysis concluded it wasn't needed, but your analysis might have come up different (and might be better than mine). You might however give the remaining packages an extra look if they're really affected. > > I do not intend to change the "Priority: important" or "Important: yes" > attributes of fdisk. Dropping the (XB-)Important: yes might be nice to do at some point. I'm not sure how that will affect systems where fdisk got pulled in via the transitional dependency and I guess the package are there marked as auto-installed. If we drop 'Important: yes' and the fdisk package ends up as an 'apt autoremove' target I think that would be bad (but I'm not sure if that's what actually happens). > > Helmut [...] FWIW Given bugs where filed over 2 years ago and AFAIR the progress on getting the bugs reports closed stopped quite a while ago I think it would be fair to just go ahead and make fdisk non-pseudo-essential and then just bumping severity of the remaining bug reports. Regards, Andreas Henriksson PS. Who-ever does the next util-linux upload I'd recommend you also include the Merge-Request !8 available on salsa util-linux repo while at it.
