Re: future of aufs in Debian.

[Noah Meyerhans <noahm@debian.org>]

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 05:10:10PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > Adrian filed a rc bug in November 2019 which received no maintainer response, however the package was not autoremoved from testing due to aufs and aufs-tools being considered a "key packages" due to high popcon. This popcon actually seems to be growing in both absolute and percentage terms. I presume the high popcon is due to some deriviative (hence debian-derivatives and debian-live in cc) using aufs in their live image builds (as far as I can tell debian's own live images seem to use overlayfs instead nowadays).
> >...
> 
> It doesn't have to be a derivative, one webhoster who installs popcon by 
> default is enough.

It's very possible that it is the upstream Docker packaging that
accounts for the upward trend.  The docker.io packages in the Debian
archive list aufs-tools as "Suggests", so they won't be pulled in by
default, but the upstream docker-ce packages distributed directly by
Docker still have them at Recommends.

Docker no longer users aufs by default, though, having switched to
overlayfs some time ago.  I'm sure we could get them to drop the
Recommends if we're considering getting rid of it.

noah