Hi, Sean Whitton wrote: > On Mon 16 Nov 2020 at 04:12AM +01, Guillem Jover wrote: > > On Sat, 2020-11-07 at 13:30:13 -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
>>> Could I ask you to explain your wanting to reduce the Essential set for >>> the sake of small installation size in more detail, including some >>> numbers, please? It would be good to get to the bottom of Bill's worry >>> about this change, but in addition, I would like to see a stronger >>> positive case. >> >> I'm not sure about Josh, but I think the main reasons for wanting to >> reduce the essential set are: >> >> - Making chroots/containers slimmer, which can have a substantial >> impact when needing lots of them, where even few MiB can make a >> difference. >> - Making bootstrapping (build and installation) in general easier, >> even though for the former these packages also need to then >> be ideally removed from the build-essential set too. > > Thank you for this, but I was hoping for some more specifics. For > example, what are some examples of large Essential: yes packages that > might actually, in practice, be removable? See https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/EssentialOnDiet: an example is e2fsprogs, which is ~2.1 MiB. (You might not consider that large, but when you multiply that by "every Debian installation everywhere", it adds up.) https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=nonessentiale2fsprogs;users=helm...@debian.org shows that people are already adding explicit dependencies on it, which means that https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=954794;msg=111 is the de facto policy / what people believe policy to say. (Which is a surprise to me, but it's a useful signal.) Thanks, Jonathan
