Re: Explicitly depending on Essential packages (was: Dropping awk?)
On Mon, 21 Apr 2025 01:34:56 +0300, Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org>
wrote:
>On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 04:46:52PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>> Factual statements about one's run-time dependencies should be as
>> decoupled from the details of the set of "Essential" packages as
>> possible. One reason is that the identities of the people making these
>> decisions are disjoint. Often a package maintainer lacks this power;
>> except for dependencies they introduce through operation of their
>> maintainer scripts (or Debian add-ons), such run-time dependencies are
>> beyond their control.
>>...
>
>While this might sound good in theory, in practice it would be horrible.
>
>As an example, libc6 has a preinst script that calls dpkg, sed,
>grep and rm.
>
>Making these dependencies explicit would be something like
> Pre-Depends: sh, dpkg, sed, grep, coreutils
>
>I would expect that such Pre-Depends cycles between essential packages
>and libc6 will result in broken systems during upgrades.
I have always been less than a fan of not being allowed to declare
dependency on bash or coreutils, but a (non-logical) tradeoff would be
allowing to declare such dependencies, and liberally removing (or
demoting) them if they cause a cycle. I don't expect that to happen
too often.
>And then there's the normal time-waste like "the package ships
>a bash-completion file that uses awk, grep, sed and sort - that's
>dependencies on four essential packages".
I'd rather do that than having to spend hours updating year numbers in
machine readable debian/copyright.
Greetings
Marc
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