El 21/4/25 a las 14:02, Chris Hofstaedtler escribió:
I would suggest you hit up some of the current maintainers of Essential: yes packages, and leave the naysayers on d-devel to themselves.
Note that there might be some overlap in those two sets of people. The set of currently essential packages, and the fact that awk is among them in particular, reflects a consensus which may be seen as nearly "foundational". Consensus is not sacred and everything is open to discussion, but extraordinary breakages of consensus (like this one) should require extraordinary benefits, and in this case we are talking about 263KB in a container image several orders of magnitude bigger. Also, while the idea of Josh might sound good in theory (adding dependencies will not harm anybody, we just want to see the dependencies explicit), it might create some undeserved pressure on maintainers to stop using awk. In some cases I'm sure that it would be easy to rewrite the code, but in some others the alternate construction may be a lot less readable, and overall worse. Note also that the base system and the container images are expected to grow over time, because everything grows over time, but machines hosting those container images also grow over time, so one would naturally wonder why awk has become a problem now when it was never a problem due to its extremely small size. My modest proposal here after trixie, if there is a consensus that it's a good step, would be to replace mawk by original-awk in the base system and see what can we learn from that. I would see that little change as something similar to what we did with /bin/sh being replaced by dash to ensure compatibility and standards compliance (back then, we discovered some bashisms, and we either rewrote them to be sh-compliant or used #!/bin/bash instead, and everybody was happy with those little incremental changes). I don't think we have many mawk-isms in the distribution, but this would be an opportunity to check if all AWKs are really interchangeable. Thanks.
