On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 06:25:53PM +0100, Josh Triplett 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.
Should we start declaring deps on all essential packages explicitly? -- WBR, wRAR
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