Hi, Josh Triplett wrote:
> Over the years, "Essential" has made it difficult to reduce installation > size, to reduce chroot/container size, or to coordinate various > transitions. Removing something from the Essential set requires tracking > down every package using it, adding a dependency, carefully managing a > transition across Debian releases, and risking breakage of third-party > packages outside Debian. Interesting. On the other side if we were to eliminate Essential would be bloat in the Packages file from e.g. ~every package needing Pre-Depends on a shell. [...] > This change does not propose eliminating the concept of Essential, nor > does it propose that any specific package become non-Essential. I think I'd be more supportive of this change if it did. Freezing the current essential set in time feels oddly unpragmatic. If we had a plan, even one that would take a while, to shrink the essential set, then it would be more likely to feel worth the cognitive load. I think there is still a problem to solve here --- e.g. maybe there is some definition of essential that we may want to move to that would include things like base-files but wouldn't include things like dpkg (to take an extreme example) but I don't think we've found it yet. So even though I'm a fan of the intent here, I agree with the consensus that we should close this until we have a more specific proposal. Thanks, Jonathan