peter green wrote:
Johannes Schauer wrote:Hi,the following is a report of a successful implementation of what I have beentalking about with Niels Thykier during debconf13. The question was howimportant it is for a source package to be compilable or exist in the first place given an incomplete port which is in the process of being bootstrapped.This work is solving a different purpose than the identification of "keypackages" by Lucas Nussbaum [1]. Instead of attaching a binary value to eachsource package, this method is associating integer values to them. Oncebootstrapping of the whole archive becomes more important or even possible in real life through an implementation of build profiles, this heuristic could beused to further extend the meaning of "key packages" as well.One problem with these metrics is that you get source packages whose importance is artifically inflated because of the way our source packages work. If anything in a source package needs x then the whole source package has to build-depend on x. Even if x is only needed for some perhipheral functionlity that could easilly be removed in the event that x was unavailable (either on a particular port or in general). In the case of libraries there may be a binary dependency too for rarely used fuctionality. For example some of the mesa libraries drag in libwayland0 which means wayland ends up with a very high importance even though afaict hardly anyone uses it right now.
There's also issues where an individual package makes questionable assertions about its dependencies. For example, both elvis and nmap have the option of a GUI frontend, which means that as soon as they're installed onto a headless system they force a significant amount of X stuff to be loaded even if this is not desired.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]