Re: Debian package bcftools

[Steffen Möller <steffen_moeller@gmx.de>]

Actually, I appreciate your forward to this mailing list - it is some
nice food for thought. We may yet have been mostly concerned about
maintainability, less so on specifying fractions of workflows that
complete workflows.

@Gulio, are you are of the --no-install-recommends option to apt-get
install? Would that allow you to circumvent your concern to optimise
your docker image? Also, you can possibly remove all the binaries you
don't need to reduce the final size of your image, right? Maybe you want
to remove parts of packages after an installation, like in
dpkg -L bcftools | grep '^/usr/share/doc' | xargs -r rm ?

Olivier may have additional ideas.

Best,
Steffen

On 13.06.20 21:10, Michael Crusoe wrote:
> [I'm cc'ing the Debian Med mailing list as your email contains no
> private information]
>
> Dear Giulio,
>
> It is nice to hear that you are finding the Debian package of bcftools
> useful. The correct way to request support from the volunteer
> contributors to Debian is to documented at
> https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting
> <https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting>
>
> Cheers!
>
> --
> Michael R. Crusoe
>
> On Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 20:0 Giulio Genovese <giulio.genovese@gmail.com
> <mailto:giulio.genovese@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Michael,
>
>     I have noticed you are involved in the packaging of the bcftools
>     software as a debian package. I am not sure whether you are the
>     right person I should address, but if not maybe you can help me
>     find who I should address instead.
>
>     I have been working with bcftools and in particular with dockers
>     that must run bcftools inside. This is all made very simple by the
>     bcftools debian package. However, I have noticed that the approach
>     of installing bcftools as a debian package causes apt-get to also
>     pull perl and perl modules which cause the docker image to
>     increase in size significantly. The bcftools package contains a
>     handful of python and perl binaries, but the main software is
>     written in C and has very few dependencies. Currently python is a
>     suggested dependency, while perl is a mandatory dependency. This
>     seems a bit inconsistent. Could the perl dependency also be made
>     optional? This would go a long way making it easier to generate
>     minimalistic docker images with a minimal footprint using apt-get.
>
>     All the best,
>
>     Giulio