Re: New package split of util-linux

[Andreas Henriksson <andreas@fatal.se>]

Hello Adam Borowski,

thanks for your feedback.

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 11:03:08AM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> But why should mount be Essential?  It's useless in containers and chroots.

I'm very open to making things non-essential if possible, not limited to
only mount. (Why should bsdutils be essential for example? But how do we
make it non-essential? Even if policy didn't forbid depending on
essential packages, how would we even identify users that should add
a dependency? See also #474540 for another example of this practical
problem.)

I aware of but have no practical experience with the Important: yes
field. I can only guess and hope that if we use that for mount there
won't be any weird upgrade problems. (Help welcome to verify it!)

One thing to consider first though might be if the findmnt utility
should be moved over to util-linux package (I likely put this tool in
the wrong place to begin with since it didn't matter much back then).
WDYT?

[...]
> What about making the split at different levels of essentialness?  With the
> new Important: yes (not be confused with priority: important), this makes
> three levels, and thus three packages:
> * stuff that's needed on every Debian system
> * stuff needed on every bare-metal box / "real" VM
> * things you can go without

I would be very interested to see your resulting of this splitup!

Also please consider it in the light of the previous criterias I posted.
(Because suggesting something better which have doable upgrade path from
the current state is problematic from a practical perspective.
In theory I'm not really sure there's anything matching the "stuff
that's needed on every Debian system" criteria in src:util-linux
if considering less usual usecases.)

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson