Re: RFC: No new Essential packages?
On Sun, Feb 02, 2020 at 07:54:42PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
> 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.
I think there's value in a bit of additional verbiage, which I suggested
in a subsequent reply.
- Josh Triplett
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