Re: RFC: No new Essential packages?
Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org> writes:
> Is the current wording in Policy not sufficient? In 3.8 Essential
> packages it states "this flag must not be used unless absolutely
> necessary" and later "You must not tag any packages essential before
> this has been discussed on the debian-devel mailing list and a consensus
> about doing that has been reached".
I think Josh is arguing that ideally we'd slowly move towards declaring
dependencies on essential packages explicitly, so we should indicate that
in Policy and, as a first step, say that we're not adding any entirely new
functionality to the essential set if we can help it and instead asking
people to just declare explicit dependencies.
I've never liked the rule that you don't have to declare dependencies on
essential packages and would love to phase it out as much as possible (I
think even intermediate movement in that direction would be useful), but
I'd like Guillem to weigh in from a dpkg perspective to indicate whether
this makes sense to him and whether I'm missing something.
(Also, that said, having every package that contains a shell script
declare a dependency on sh | dash and every package that uses a common
shell utility declare a dependency on coreutils, despite being a nice way
to remove some special cases and make the dependency structure more
explicit, may be a bit too tedious to want to endure.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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