Re: e2fsprogs as Essential: yes?
On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 12:45:39AM +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> In 2011 Steve Langasek proposed dropping Essential: yes from e2fsprogs.
>
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 11:47:08AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > Currently the e2fsprogs package is marked Essential: yes in the archive. Is
> > this a historical holdover? I believe e2fsprogs used to ship /sbin/fsck,
> > but since 2009 (i.e., util-linux (>= 2.15~rc1-1), which e2fsprogs has a
> > pre-depends on), this has been provided by util-linux instead.
> >
> > The remaining programs provided by e2fsprogs are all specific to the ext*
> > family of filesystems
At least the following are universal:
lsattr, chattr
badblocks
/usr/sbin/filefrag (really shouldn't be in sbin)
> > so I don't think meet the definition of Essential any
> > longer - their presence is certainly important if you have an ext[234]
> > filesystem, but while this is the default, you can have systems that don't
> > use ext* at all, which makes e2fsprogs no more essential in nature than the
> > other per-filesystem fsck tools.
I'm not sure if _host_ systems with space so low to care about getting rid
of e2fsprogs are real use cases (such extreme embedded are not going to run
unmodified Debian). Containers on the other hand have little use for fsck
or badblocks, and only rarely for {ls,ch}attr or filefrag. Thus, requiring
users of other filesystems to have e2fsprogs installed is not a big burden,
even if we'd still want the option to not have any such tools at all.
> I think we should revisit this proposal now that it becomes practical.
>
> To get us going, I have come up with a plan:
>
> 1) Analyze which packages would need dependencies on e2fsprogs.
> 2) File a bug against lintian to stop complaining about e2fsprogs
> dependencies.
> 3) MBF those packages that need an e2fsprogs dependency.
> 4) Drop Essential: yes from e2fsprogs.
Alas, this plan would break partial upgrades from stretch to buster. Thus,
we'd need to do 3) in buster then 4) only in bullseye.
> So I thought, "how hard can it be?" All we need to do is grep the
> archive for those tools and add those dependencies.
> 318 occurrences in 133 binary packages.
> I think we can check off the analysis part. How about proceeding with
> the lintian bug and the MBF now? Did I miss anything?
Sounds good to me.
Meow!
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