On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 02:56:58PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 01:38:18PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > > Simon Josefsson wrote: > > > Debian trixie images ship with 'mawk' pre-installed right now. While > > > I'm not convinced the removal game is necessarily a good one, I can > > > see that it does have some advantages. Is it possible to drop 'mawk' > > > from the set of default tools in trixie? If not, what are the > > > blockers? What is the method to find out what the blockers are? > > > > I would *love* to see the Essential set reduced. But I think this is > > combining a couple of steps, and we'd do better to separate those steps. > > > > One is "should we make dependencies on awk explicit, rather than having > > them be implicit and undocumented because awk is Essential". > > The other is "should we reduce dependencies on awk". > > > > The latter may or may not happen in any individual case, but I think the > > former would have a lot of value independently. > > The former without the latter is just a lot of wasted work without any > benefits. [...] > > In general, I think this is roughly the right approach for any proposed > > work on the Essential set, with the first step being to declare > > dependencies explicitly. > > It's just a waste of time, especially if the end goal is not defined > from the start.
What I'm suggesting here is that if every individual package that needs awk has a Depends on it (via a package that allows switching implementations), rather than relying on Essential, then it becomes possible to make incremental progress, and that incremental progress benefits people who are willing to carefully remove some of what Debian normally always has installed packages. If you're already building the kind of container that will want to remove dpkg and apt (among other things) when you're done building it, it'd be nice to have dependency metadata that helps you figure out what is and isn't still used. That's useful even if not everything eliminates its dependencies yet. By way of example: e2fsprogs uses awk (in e2scrub), but many container builders will remove that package (or never install it in the first place), so it's not particularly important to do anything about its dependency on awk, *other than declaring it*. If other, harder-to-remove packages manage to stop using awk, then awk becomes removable, in a less error-prone way. > If someone wants to remove awk from the essential set, > then replacing the far larger sed would also be desirable. [...] > Unless someone wants to get rid of Perl in the essential set, > which is 10 times the size of AWK and sed combined. That would be ideal, yeah. > The sane starting point would be discussing which tools should be part > of the (transitive) essential set. In an ideal world, rather than trying to pick which of sed/awk/perl/etc are used in the core tools of Debian, one path would be to turn many such core tools into compiled programs. Another would be to identify tools that are only used *during installation or upgrade* but are never needed by the running system (e.g. `update-initramfs`), and make it easier to remove those. There'd be no particular need to prioritize removing the usage of awk/sed/perl/python/etc from such tools.
