Bug#954794: New packages must not declare themselves Essential

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Sean Whitton wrote:
> On Mon 16 Nov 2020 at 04:12AM +01, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Thank you for this, but I was hoping for some more specifics.  For
> example, what are some examples of large Essential: yes packages that
> might actually, in practice, be removable?

See https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/EssentialOnDiet: an example is
e2fsprogs, which is ~2.1 MiB.  (You might not consider that large, but
when you multiply that by "every Debian installation everywhere", it
adds up.)

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=nonessentiale2fsprogs;users=helmutg@debian.org
shows that people are already adding explicit dependencies on it,
which means that
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=954794;msg=111 is
the de facto policy / what people believe policy to say.  (Which is a
surprise to me, but it's a useful signal.)

Thanks,
Jonathan