Bug#1027832: debian-policy: Please clarify that priority required packages are not automatically build essential
Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org> writes:
> El 4/1/23 a las 2:32, Sam Hartman escribió:
>> Why not just make all required packages build-essential? I agree we
>> should fix the class of bugs you are talking about, but it seems like
>> in some cases it might be easier to fix them by declaring them not
>> buggy.
> Because required to build != required in a _running_ system
I think that's why Sam suggested making them build-essential, not
essential.
> The idea of declaring something not a bug to avoid fixing it is not very
> appealing to me. I believe we can do better than that.
I think the part that I don't understand is why we would bite off a
possibly substantial amount of work to minimize the *build-essential* set.
I understand why we want to minimize the essential set: we want to support
tiny systems and small containers and other cases where Debian shouldn't
hog a bunch of disk space. But if you are building new Debian packages,
by definition you are not in a tiny minimal system case. build-essential
is already somewhat arbitrary and chosen for convenience (most packages do
not require a C++ compiler). Why not expand build-essential to what we're
largely doing in practice to fix the consistency problem (which is a real
issue) but not add work tweaking build dependencies for a bunch of
packages? What benefit are we gaining from trying to push for that extra
bit of minimization of *build* environments?
To be clear, this is a real question, not rhetorical. It's quite likely
that there is some benefit that I'm not seeing (such as with bootstrapping
new architectures).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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