On 2022-12-16 Santiago Vila <sanv...@debian.org> wrote: > Greetings.
> I'm doing archive-wide rebuilds again. > I've just filed 21 bugs with subject "Missing build-depends on tzdata" > in bookworm (as tzdata is not build-essential). > This is of course not fun for the maintainers, but it's also not fun > for people doing QA, because those bugs could be caught earlier in the > chain, but they are not. This is extra work for everybody. > (Similar bugs are even sliding into stable releases, I plan to report > a few of them against bullseye after 11.6 this Saturday, as bullseye > is the currently supported stable release). > Because people accept the default by debootrap "as is", chroots used > to build packages include packages which are neither essential nor > build-essential, like tzdata, mount or e2fsprogs. [...] or apt. I am wondering if there is point to this or whether policy should be changed? Is there some value in investing work in having packages buildable without Prioriry required packages? Such installations can only be found as artifacts since there does not seem to be a supported way to upgrade them or (un)install packages (quoting policy: "Removing a "required" package may cause your system to become totally broken and you may not even be able to use "dpkg" to put things back, so only do so if you know what you are doing.") Essentialy policy is telling us it might work to install b-d, and uninstall Prioriry required, however dpkg might break halfway through and it would not be a bug. cu Andreas -- `What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are so grateful to you.' `I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'
