Bug#954794: New packages must not declare themselves Essential

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Sat, 2020-11-07 at 13:30:13 -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
> Could I ask you to explain your wanting to reduce the Essential set for
> the sake of small installation size in more detail, including some
> numbers, please?  It would be good to get to the bottom of Bill's worry
> about this change, but in addition, I would like to see a stronger
> positive case.

I'm not sure about Josh, but I think the main reasons for wanting to
reduce the essential set are:

  - Making chroots/containers slimmer, which can have a substantial
    impact when needing lots of them, where even few MiB can make a
    difference.
  - Making bootstrapping (build and installation) in general easier,
    even though for the former these packages also need to then
    be ideally removed from the build-essential set too.

Then there are these:

  - Making the packaging system less opaque, as the full implications
    of Essential:yes do not seem generally clear to all maintainers?
  - Making it easier to use alternative implementations for some of
    these packages, as then it's easier to know what depends on what,
    instead of having to unconditionally provide the entire interface
    surface for anything.
  - Making it easier to handle some multiarch problems, as then
    dependencies can be explicitly marked as needed.

Thanks,
Guillem