Re: Bug#46184: mtools

[eichin@thok.org (Mark W. Eichin)]

It looks like "floppyd" is the only thing that needs X.  (It's pretty
scary, from the man page -- yes, it's a tribute to debian packaging
tools that I didn't notice this extra component in the upstream
release, I'll be more procedurally careful about that...)

> Correction: mtools in slink does *not* depend on anything but libc6, so

mtools in slink didn't have floppyd.

I'm not sure it *is* better to fork things off; that's a fair amount
of hair for one isolated program.  Given the extent to which new
package insertion from incoming has been backlogged, I'm afraid it
might also be a while before it got uploaded, and I'd have to consider
instead dropping floppyd from the install, though that seems a poor
choice...

I've looked in the developers-reference and the packaging-manual and
don't see any reference to the old arguments about emacs [as I recall
them, "don't bother with split emacs and emacs-nox packages, xlib is
small and the end-user complexity/confusion is not worth it"].
Unfortunately, without those references, we're doomed to rehash this
again -- if "emacs is much bigger than xlib anyway" was the rationale,
I can't hide be hind it, since xlib6g is about 10 times the size of
the mtools package :-) emacs19 is 5 times larger than that.

I'll entertain further discussion of course (be sure to cc 46184@bugs,
though you may want to trim other participants.)

			_Mark_ <eichin@thok.org>
			The Herd of Kittens
			Debian Mtools Package Maintainer