Re: Dropping awk?
On 2025-04-20 Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> 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
[...]
> 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.
This has already come up, but I think it is worth noting more
prominently. There is a third important use case:
3) Essential packages can be used in preinst and postrm
maintainer-scripts. (The former usage can be made explicit mit
Pre-Depends, the latter would need to be dropped if a command lost
Essential status.)
cu Andreas
--
`What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are
so grateful to you.'
`I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'
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