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. Then there are these: - Making the packaging system less opaque, as the full implications of Essential:yes do not seem generally clear to all maintainers? - Making it easier to use alternative implementations for some of these packages, as then it's easier to know what depends on what, instead of having to unconditionally provide the entire interface surface for anything. - Making it easier to handle some multiarch problems, as then dependencies can be explicitly marked as needed. Thanks, Guillem