Hello, On Sat 01 Feb 2020 at 11:59AM -08, Russ Allbery wrote: > 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. In this case, it doesn't seem like we'd need any new normative wording in Policy -- I think Ansgar is right that the current text ensures that we're not adding any new functionality to the essential set if we can help it. What we might need is new, purely informative wording saying that one reason for the restrictions is that we're working towards declaring dependencies on essential packages explicitly (if indeed that is something we want to do, which I don't yet have a firm opinion on). -- Sean Whitton
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