Bug#954794: New packages must not declare themselves Essential

[jrnieder@gmail.com]

Hi,

Josh Triplett wrote:

> Over the years, "Essential" has made it difficult to reduce installation
> size, to reduce chroot/container size, or to coordinate various
> transitions. Removing something from the Essential set requires tracking
> down every package using it, adding a dependency, carefully managing a
> transition across Debian releases, and risking breakage of third-party
> packages outside Debian.

Interesting.  On the other side if we were to eliminate Essential
would be bloat in the Packages file from e.g. ~every package needing
Pre-Depends on a shell.

[...]
> This change does not propose eliminating the concept of Essential, nor
> does it propose that any specific package become non-Essential.

I think I'd be more supportive of this change if it did.  Freezing the
current essential set in time feels oddly unpragmatic.  If we had a
plan, even one that would take a while, to shrink the essential set,
then it would be more likely to feel worth the cognitive load.

I think there is still a problem to solve here --- e.g. maybe there is
some definition of essential that we may want to move to that would
include things like base-files but wouldn't include things like dpkg
(to take an extreme example) but I don't think we've found it yet.

So even though I'm a fan of the intent here, I agree with the
consensus that we should close this until we have a more specific
proposal.

Thanks,
Jonathan