Ansgar <ans...@43-1.org> writes: > Is the current wording in Policy not sufficient? In 3.8 Essential > packages it states "this flag must not be used unless absolutely > necessary" and later "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".
I think Josh is arguing that ideally we'd slowly move towards declaring dependencies on essential packages explicitly, so we should indicate that in Policy and, as a first step, say that we're not adding any entirely new functionality to the essential set if we can help it and instead asking people to just declare explicit dependencies. I've never liked the rule that you don't have to declare dependencies on essential packages and would love to phase it out as much as possible (I think even intermediate movement in that direction would be useful), but I'd like Guillem to weigh in from a dpkg perspective to indicate whether this makes sense to him and whether I'm missing something. (Also, that said, having every package that contains a shell script declare a dependency on sh | dash and every package that uses a common shell utility declare a dependency on coreutils, despite being a nice way to remove some special cases and make the dependency structure more explicit, may be a bit too tedious to want to endure.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
