Bug#776557: debian-policy: Please clarify 2.5 'unix heritage >= important'

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

> Le Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 09:06:15AM +0000, Martin Zobel-Helas a écrit :
> > 
> > the following sentence in 2.5 leave much room for maneuver, therefor i
> > would like to see a clarification how it should be interpreted:
> > 
> > | Important programs, including those which one would expect to find on
> > | any Unix-like system. If the expectation is that an experienced Unix
> > | person who found it missing would say "What on earth is going on, where
> > | is foo?", it must be an important package.

Le Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 10:03:27PM +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :
> 
> Given that Debian is 20 years old, we can not expect people to have the same
> opinion on "What on earth is going on, where is foo?" means.  On my side, I
> thought that "killall" or "less" would be "what-on-earth" programs, but this is
> not the case.  My first reaction was to argue they should be present by default
> on minimal systems, but my current opinion would be to rather keep minimal
> systems as lean as possible and rely on tasks for adding groups of packages.
> 
> Regarding the Policy, we need to either find a different principle for defining
> the "Important" priority, or transfer the responsibility for choices to a
> "do-o-cratic" group of persons, like people making minimal images, maintaining
> debootstrap, etc.  (and by default, the package maintainer of course)

Hello everybody,

stimulated by the progesses in #758234, I would like to propose a new definition
for the "important" Priority.

First, let's look at the the definition of "required".  It is very
straigthforward: the bare minimum needed to run dpkg.  Interstingly, after a
quick look at the list of "important" packages, I have the impression that they
are close to the minimum needed to run apt over the network.  If you agree with
my analysis, I think that the Policy would be clearer with the following
alternative definition for "important".  (The last sentence is there because
man-db, debian-faq and locales are all priority:standard.)

    Packages which are necessary for a system to run `apt` and use it to
    download other packages from the network, plus the bare minimum of
    commonly-expected and necessary tools to administrate that system.  This does
    not include space-consuming features such as documentation and multilingual
    support.

Have a nice day,

(Please CC me, I have not yet  resubscribed to the list)

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan