El 28/1/23 a las 20:35, Adrian Bunk escribió:
I have so far not seen any technical arguments why removing tzdata from the build essential set would be better for Debian than keeping it there. Removing tzdata reduces the size of a chroot that has the build dependencies for the hello package installed by ~ 0.5%, this size decrease does not strike me as a sufficient reason for reducing the build essential set.
I believe tzdata not being build-essential is useful for two reasons: One of them: I've actually found *two* cases where the build failure (when not having tzdata in the chroot) was due to a missing *binary* dependency (of one of the build-depends). The missing binary bug may not be very relevant, but it was discovered thanks to using a minimal build environment (and reporting build failures), as a side effect. The other one: There are a bunch of packages whose unit tests rely on tzdata. The tzdata package changes often during the lifetime of stable, and as a result, some package might stop building from source. If we wanted to know in advance which packages might break after a tzdata update, we could use the available information in the build-depends fields. Of course, not that I personally have plenty of time for that, but in a general sense, having the information of which packages use tzdata for building is better than not having such information anywhere. As you requested, I think the above two are technical reasons, not merely "because policy says so". Thanks.
