At 2025-04-20T23:22:04+0500, Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote: > On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 06:25:53PM +0100, Josh Triplett wrote: > > 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?
I think that's a good idea. "Explicit is better than implicit," as the Zen of Python puts it.[1] Factual statements about one's run-time dependencies should be as decoupled from the details of the set of "Essential" packages as possible. One reason is that the identities of the people making these decisions are disjoint. Often a package maintainer lacks this power; except for dependencies they introduce through operation of their maintainer scripts (or Debian add-ons), such run-time dependencies are beyond their control. By contrast, the population of the Essential set is up to...well, I'm not sure who. Some vaguely defined intersection of the dpkg maintainer(s), the release managers, and installer team, I guess. In principle, the all of the developers collectively (and interested discussants) are responsible for such decisions. Unfortunately, decisions in Debian are sometimes not made by those whom we claim. "You must not tag any packages essential before this has been discussed on the debian-devel mailing list and a consensus about doing that has been reached." -- Debian Policy Manual, ยง3.8[2] That implies to me that a package can be taken _out_ of the essential set unilaterally by the package maintainer(s) of a package that's in it, but because of the status quo of being able to depend on an essential package without declaring that fact, in practice that probably wouldn't work well, and we should update the Policy Manual to require discussion of the dropping of such a "tag" as well. ...for which achievement of the goal you propose is a prerequisite. One of the current Policy Manual editors might opine. Regards, Branden [1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ [2] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html#essential-packages
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