G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2025-04-20T23:22:04+0500, Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 06:25:53PM +0100, Josh Triplett wrote: > > > What I'm suggesting here is that if every individual package that > > > needs awk has a Depends on it (via a package that allows switching > > > implementations), rather than relying on Essential, then it becomes > > > possible to make incremental progress, and that incremental progress > > > benefits people who are willing to carefully remove some of what > > > Debian normally always has installed packages. > > > > Should we start declaring deps on all essential packages explicitly? > > I think that's a good idea. "Explicit is better than implicit," as the > Zen of Python puts it.[1]
Agreed, but... > Factual statements about one's run-time dependencies should be as > decoupled from the details of the set of "Essential" packages as > possible. [...] > By contrast, the population of the Essential set is up to...well, I'm > not sure who. Some vaguely defined intersection of the dpkg > maintainer(s), the release managers, and installer team, I guess. > > In principle, the all of the developers collectively (and interested > discussants) are responsible for such decisions. Unfortunately, > decisions in Debian are sometimes not made by those whom we claim. > > "You must not tag any packages essential before this has been discussed > on the debian-devel mailing list and a consensus about doing that has > been reached." -- Debian Policy Manual, ยง3.8[2] > > That implies to me that a package can be taken _out_ of the essential > set unilaterally by the package maintainer(s) of a package that's in it, > but because of the status quo of being able to depend on an essential > package without declaring that fact, in practice that probably wouldn't > work well, and we should update the Policy Manual to require discussion > of the dropping of such a "tag" as well. I think that's a bug in Policy as written, rather than a bug in practice. Historical practice has definitely been to discuss such removals (extensively). We should have a well-defined process for this, that includes discussion transition plans (involving the introduction of Depends as needed first), and similar.
