On Sun, 2017-11-12 at 18:27:16 -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 09:13:42PM +0100, Mathieu Parent wrote: > > There is another way to trim the locales: Use dpkg's "--path-exclude=". > > > > This also allows one to keep some locales. This is what we use at work > > [1]. The problem is that debootstrap doesn't handle those options, so > > we need to hack a bit [2]. > > > > [1]: > > https://github.com/nantesmetropole/docker-debian/blob/master/templates/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/01_save-space > > [2]: > > https://github.com/nantesmetropole/docker-debian/blob/master/templates/post-debootstrap.sh > > You can always manually delete binaries afterwards or by using > --path-exclude, but that has always seemed to be a hack to me. By > that argument there's no point making e2fsprogs Essential: no / > Priority: important, since you could just remove the files you don't > want (mke2fs, e2fsck, etc.) afterwards. :-)
I don't think that's comparable at all. Excluding documentation, locales and similar stuff is perfectly fine (and even permitted by policy), as those are not supposed to be expected even by the same package, and are not part of the interface provided by the package towards other packages. Doing the same with binaries or any other interface-providing file means that dependency system is undermined, more so for an Essential package, because as the dependencies are implicit, it means *any* package (its content and maintainer scripts) might become broken, perhaps in a silent way. I think that trying to trim down the pseudo-Essential set is an extremely worthwhile goal, because it has visible effects on several areas, at least: - Possibly making bootstrapping a port way easier. - Making it possible and easier to use Debian on (very) embedded systems. - Reducing footprint for minbase setups, such as VM images, buildds, chroots, and similar. And most importantly, please do not take this personally, this is not some concerted effort against e2fsprogs! :) Personally I (and I think others too) would like to see many other packages out from the pseudo-Essential set, such as, to name a few: bash, perl-base, tar, login (any init and login thing really). For more info please see https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/EssentialOnDiet and https://wiki.debian.org/BusterPriorityRequalification. Thanks, Guillem
