Bug#994275: Reverting breaking changes in debianutils

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org>]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2021 at 10:44:06AM +0200, Ansgar wrote:
> On Fri, 2021-09-24 at 09:26 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > In my opinion, an amicable middle-ground proposal would be that the 
> > debianutils maintainer completely removes "which" from debianutils,
> > and assuming the sysvinit-utils maintainers agree, that they adopt
> > both the existing "which" and (at least temporarily) "tempfile".
> 
> There is an open bug asking for sysvinit-utils to no longer be
> essential[1]. With that in mind one should probably not move new stuff
> to it to keep it in the essential set.
> 
> (This is no argument for/against `which` and/or `tempfile` to be
> considered essential.)
> 
> Ansgar
> 
>   [1]: https://bugs.debian.org/851747


  - get moved to an existing Essential package, perhaps debianutils

Ouch.

I didn't mention that debianutils would not be the worst place and name 
for a random-stuff-that-is-essential-for-historical-reasons package
since that would not have been constructive here...

which+tempfile+sysvinit-utils combined is not much more than 100 kB
binaries in the essential set.

coreutils grew from 15.7 MB in buster to 17.5 MB in bullseye,
which has added literally more than an order of magnitude more to
the essential set than all these programs people want to remove.

After the release of bullseye, debianutils has added                  
a nearly 4 kB "update-shells" to the essential set.

Compared to these I have not yet seen any reason (or clear maintainer 
statement) why removing the 1 kB "which" script from the essential set 
would be worth all the troubles all this has already caused in other 
packages, plus all future work it causes.

cu
Adrian