Re: Bug#758234: transitive dependencies
Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> writes:
> a better way to achieve the same result with fewer steps and more
> automation would be:
> * a cron job (jenkins.debian.net?) installs the required, important,
> standard sets (which is something we probably want to test anyway)
> * people who are interested in whether a package is transitively
> important look at what was installed by that cron job
I think I mentioned this earlier in a different thread, but usually what
people really care about is size, not the specific package list. Right
now, we're obsessing over the package list, while completely ignoring the
size. That seems incorrect to me; the package list is an implementation
detail.
More useful would be a cron job that calculates the transitive closure of
required, important, and standard and then calls attention to differences
in the installed size of those sets, and where the size deltas are coming
from. That will let us catch packages in required suddenly bloating for
reasons other than dependencies, which I strongly suspect is more common
(by frequency) than dependency bloat.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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