Hi Josh (it's been a long time since XFree86 packaging days!), At 2025-04-21T01:42:52+0100, Josh Triplett wrote: > G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > "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, §3.8[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.
I agree that the Policy Manual should be fixed to document the deliberative process we actually use in this case as well as the one it already contemplates. But I want to reëmphasize that explicit Dependency declarations would make it easier to see and reason about such things. Regards, Branden
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