Re: Dropping awk?
Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote:
> Should we start declaring deps on all essential packages explicitly?
I personally think that would be a good idea, though I'm not currently
trying to make the case for that across the board here. Right now, I'm
trying to make the case that that's a good first step for any packages
people might want to work on making optional. I doubt that anyone is
likely to make coreutils non-essential anytime soon (though the ability
to replace it with smaller alternatives would be nice), but on the other
hand, tools like perl-base, awk, and sed would be a lot more
feasible, as well as some higher-level things like ncurses-bin and
ncurses-base (not typically needed for systems that don't support
logins).
>From what I've seen, there are two arguments for Essential:
1) Shrinking the Packages file. This is something that good compression
handles quite well, and it's not obvious that it provides much of a
win. And if we *really* care about shrinking the Packages file,
there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there: MD5sum, tags
(https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/11/msg00226.html), and
several others. Eliminating MD5sum alone would save more than 1MB of
*compressed* size from the currently ~8MB Packages.xz. And the names
of common packages are *much* more compressible than MD5sums. :)
2) Maintenance: missing dependencies are hard to track and test. But
these days, we have much more automatic testing infrastructure, much
more install/upgrade/removal testing infrastructure, and many other
things. And note, in particular, that there's nothing stopping us
from adding some of these packages to *Build-Essential* at the same
time we dropped them from Essential, for convenience.
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