Fay Stegerman <f...@obfusk.net> writes: > [Added diffosc...@lists.reproducible-builds.org to Cc] > > * Fay Stegerman <f...@obfusk.net> [2024-11-06 17:43]: >> * Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues <jo...@debian.org> [2024-11-06 02:28]: >> [...] >> > Have one package diffoscope and one package diffoscope-full and you could >> > even >> > have a package diffoscope-minimal and there you have user-selectable >> > granularity. >> >> We already have two diffoscope packages for exactly this reason (I work on >> diffoscope and only have -minimal installed myself): >> >> $ apt-cache show diffoscope/sid | grep -A1 full >> This is a dependency package that recommends the full set of external tools, >> to support as many type of files as possible. >> >> $ apt-cache show diffoscope-minimal/sid | grep -A2 partial >> This -minimal package only recommends a partial set of the supported 3rd >> party >> tools needed to produce file-format-specific comparisons, excluding those >> that >> are considered too large or niche for general use. > > IMO in the case of diffoscope it could make sense to have multiple tools > metapackages, like a diffoscope-tools-android etc., to both make it easier to > avoid those dependencies if you know you don't need them, but also to easily > install the dependencies for the file formats you do work with.
I think even diffoscope-minimal pulls in too much - all i wanted was a better version of debdiff, but diffoscope-minimal recommends things like openssl, openssh-client, r-base-core which seem well beyong "minimal" -- but you cant just purge all its recommends as some (like xz-utils) are needed for other reasons.
