On 2025-09-09, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 09, 2025 at 02:00:24PM -0700, Chris Lamb wrote:
>> Richard Lewis wrote:
>> > i know i can remove recommends, but it's a chore as you but can't
>> > just blindly remove everything given that other packages may also
>> > depend on them (eg gpg, e2fsprogs).
...
> the binary package "diffoscope" itself also just "recommends" everything
> else, so one could just use --no-install-recommends on that to achieve
> said result, without using the -minimal variant.
>
>
> IIRC the -minimal variant uses a curated, restricted list of packages in
> the Recommends fields, described as:
> This -minimal package only recommends a partial set of the supported 3rd
> party
> tools needed to produce file-format-specific comparisons, excluding those
> that
> are considered too large or niche for general use.
...
> # Set of tools considered "large" in their installation size or too niche in
> # their target users. This is so they can easily be excluded from installation
> # if not required in most cases. Note that these are the names of the tools
> # (ie. the keys in the EXTERNAL_TOOLS dict), not the package names.
> HUGE_TOOLS = {
> "ghc",
> "ocamlobjinfo",
> "llvm-bcanalyzer",
> "llvm-config",
> "llvm-dis",
> "llvm-readobj",
> "llvm-objdump",
> "ppudump",
> "javap",
> "ssconvert",
> "apktool",
> "apksigner",
> "pedump",
> "radare2",
> "dumpxsb",
> }
>
>
>
> Richard, do you see anything in the above Recommends list that you
> believe should not be recommended?The fact that both packages mostly only really differ in the number of recommends seems a bit silly to me honestly! Admittedly, diffoscope has such a broad spectrum of file type support that a package that hard-depended on even a subset of them might be a difficult judgement call... What is the actual use-case for diffoscope-minimal vs. diffoscope? At least from my perspective, I would prefer a split: diffoscope -> recommend all the things diffoscope-minimal -> suggest all the things Then "diffoscope-minimal" is truely opt-in and you explicitly pull in the features you are actually interested in, and "diffoscope" pulls in all (or nearly all) the recommended features, and you selectivly opt-out of the features you do not want... live well, vagrant
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