On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 01:28:11PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 09:28:34AM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote: > > There are a variety of reasons people don't want a package installed. > > For packages that run a service or affects how the system behaves or > > similar, it's much more debatable whether to install them by default, > > even if doing so makes some functionality Just Work. But that seems like > > *less* of a concern for things that just take up additional space but > > don't otherwise cause any issues. > > Well, it seems most of the people who are complaining about the > dependency (Depends / Recommends / Suggests) inflation are primarily > complaining about the disk space thatis involved. Even > co-installation of relatively small files (hundreds of kilobytes) has > been enough to cause complaints. Coming from a storage background > where 5 EiB of free space is a critical low storage condition leading > to SRE's getting paged, I'm not terribly sympathetic to that argument, > but people do seem to be very concerned about installation of dormant > packages even if "all" they do is consume space. > > > The "all but unusual installations" case here is "systems that have no > > non-English users *and* that care deeply enough about disk usage that a > > few MB here or there matters". (An example of such a use case: creating > > a container image or similar, where size can directly impact start time > > or download time.) > > In the case of e2fsprogs, server and container image *really* don't > have any need of translations
Personally, I am quite sympathetic to the argument about wasting disk space, and I care about the size of the base system myself. But I think the primary affordance we make for such use cases is for core system packages to have separate -l10n packages *at all* (whereas many packages just ship localization directly in the main package). In the future, if users can easily filter out locale data, we could decide that that's the easier path to support such users, and that fewer package maintainers need to maintain separate -l10n packages. I also think that defaults should cater to the cohort of users who are less inclined to (or less able to) do customization, because other users can easily override the defaults. I think, on balance, users should be able to get messages in their preferred locale by default, and users who care deeply about disk space can always remove Recommended packages or not install them in the first place. > > But until we have a mechanism like that, I think it makes sense to say > > that "support for non-English languages" is in general a Recommends as > > long as pulling it in just means taking up additional installed size on > > disk. > > > > We could also consider adding explicit documentation in Policy that > > "Packages must not require the existence of any files in > > /usr/share/locale/ in order to function in a C or C.UTF-8 locale.", > > which would make it explicit that sysadmins can use things like dpkg > > exclusions to omit all of /usr/share/locale when building tiny images. > > That might reduce the pressure on packagers to split out -l10n- > > packages. > > I agree that we should take a more opinioned stance in Debian Policy. https://bugs.debian.org/1089110
