Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> writes: > Thus, I'd re-propose a Policy change that was mentioned in multiple > threads in the past:
> "A runtime library should not Depend: or Recommend: on any packages than > other libraries or dormant data, unless the library or its programming > language provides a convenient scheme for it being loaded only > optionally. Any such dependencies should be declared by programs linked > against such a library." I think the prerequisite for making a change like this would be for the library to be able to surface this transitive requirement in metadata so that debhelper could support automatically adding it to the dependencies of all linked programs (and I'm not sure that sort of collapse of our dependency structure is a good idea). Otherwise, if a user does want to use the functionality that GnuPG provides but doesn't have gnupg installed since it's been relegated to a Suggests, do they have much hope of figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it? Or will the package just look broken? Minimal installation size is *not* the only goal here. Ease of use and lack of surprise is important to. Personally, I'd much rather have numerous unused packages installed than to have something break in an opaque way when I try to use it, even if I'm unlikely to need to use it. This is particularly the case when the additional packages don't do things like run services or (much) increase the attack surface. Personally, I think people in this thread are too worried about trying to remove as many packages from their system as possible and not worried enough about a straightforward user experience. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
