On Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:10:03 +0100 md@Linux.IT (Marco d'Itri) wrote: > On Feb 07, Luk Claes <luk@debian.org> wrote: > > > The whole archive needs to be scanned to see if no functionality of > > e2fsprogs is used without (build) dependency. Dropping the flag itself > > is just uploading e2fsprogs AFAICS. > Since Luk is on vacation, does anybody else have any ideas about how to > do this? Unpacking packages, scanning the source for binaries contained in the relevant package. We have infrastructure to do that kind of thing with lintian and other tools. Probably the biggest barrier is someone to actually run the scan and determine what to try and find. Personally, I'm not that fussed about Essential anymore - Emdebian just removes the tag from any and every package automatically. No ill effects have been identified so far. Sometimes I wonder if Debian actually needs Essential any more for anything particularly useful or commonplace. Until you try to create a system smaller than a standard debootstrap, it doesn't seem to matter whether Essential exists or not, AFAICT. (Once you do try and get smaller, you're largely on your own anyway and Essential isn't really that helpful in my experience as the packages you're trying to remove from debootstrap are some of those tagged as Essential, like perl.) Any package can be removed if you're careful - a different kernel is trivial with BSD kernels to go into stable releases, a different libc isn't hard, busybox can replace coreutils - about the only thing you need to keep is dpkg because otherwise it's hardly Debian-based anymore. ;-) -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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