On 2025-04-20 Josh Triplett <j...@joshtriplett.org> wrote: > Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote: > > Should we start declaring deps on all essential packages explicitly?
> I personally think that would be a good idea, though I'm not currently > trying to make the case for that across the board here. Right now, I'm [...] > From what I've seen, there are two arguments for Essential: > 1) Shrinking the Packages file. This is something that good compression > handles quite well, and it's not obvious that it provides much of a > win. And if we *really* care about shrinking the Packages file, > there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there: MD5sum, tags > (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/11/msg00226.html), and > several others. Eliminating MD5sum alone would save more than 1MB of > *compressed* size from the currently ~8MB Packages.xz. And the names > of common packages are *much* more compressible than MD5sums. :) > 2) Maintenance: missing dependencies are hard to track and test. But > these days, we have much more automatic testing infrastructure, much > more install/upgrade/removal testing infrastructure, and many other > things. And note, in particular, that there's nothing stopping us > from adding some of these packages to *Build-Essential* at the same > time we dropped them from Essential, for convenience. This has already come up, but I think it is worth noting more prominently. There is a third important use case: 3) Essential packages can be used in preinst and postrm maintainer-scripts. (The former usage can be made explicit mit Pre-Depends, the latter would need to be dropped if a command lost Essential status.) cu Andreas -- `What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are so grateful to you.' `I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'
