Bug#1040520: libheif1: Please don't split plugins in separate packages

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 07, 2023 at 09:46:39AM +0200, Christian Marillat wrote:
> Severity: serious

I believe that this is the wrong severity for this bug and it should be
downgraded. As I am not otherwise involved with this package, I'll leave
that up to maintainer and/or release team.

> For people like me with Install-Recommends set to false,
> no plugins are installed and I spend some time to understand why
> program like didikam, thunar or imagemagick was unable to display any
> .heic image files.

I think this is working as intended. As a shared library, libheif1 tends
to be pulled into lots of dependency trees. For instance navit
transitively depends on it without there being a need for heif plugins.
You can also use gimp in lots of ways in the absence of heif plugins. We
typically cannot turn the dependency of this (often unused) shared
library into a recommendation, but we can minimize the impact of that
dependency by moving the plugins to a different package. That's what is
being done here.

> Total size for all plugins is really small 384K
> 
> The library itself is 648K
> 
> Please remove these plugins packages and restore as it was before in 1.15.1-1

Would you rather consider enabling the installation of recommended
packages?

If you disagree here, I recommend taking this to
debian-devel@lists.debian.org as this has wider implications on more
library packages. It is the question of what you expect when you depend
on a particular shared library. To me it seems that we expect that you
can load the library an receive errors when things are not working
(rather than crash), but not more. In contrast, you expect it work fully
work. I'm not sure we have wide consensus for either of these.

Helmut