Hi Steffen,

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I am aware of the --no-install-recommends
option but currently the bcftools package has the following dependencies:
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.29), libhts3 (>= 1.10), zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), perl:any
Suggests: python, python-numpy, python-matplotlib, texlive-latex-recommended
So that the --no-install-recommends option works to avoid the python
dependencies but not the perl dependencies. Notice that bcftools contains
the following binaries:
/usr/bin/bcftools <- C binary
/usr/bin/color-chrs.pl <- to be used with bcftools +color-chrs plugin
/usr/bin/guess-ploidy.py <- ro be used with bcftools +guess-ploidy plugin
/usr/bin/plot-roh.py <- to be used with bcftools roh
/usr/bin/plot-vcfstats <- to be used with bcftools stats
/usr/bin/run-roh.pl <- to be used with bcftools roh
/usr/bin/vcfutils.pl <- standalone tool
I suppose only the last one might be of interest but I confess I have never
used it.

I am also aware of being able to manually delete perl after having it
installed as a dependency through installing bcftools. But since python is
a suggested dependency, couldn't also perl be made as one? I am definitely
not advocating for the perl (and python) binaries to be removed from the
bcftools package, as they are very small anyway. Do you think there would
be many users that would get the "perl not found" error when trying to run
vcfutils.pl if perl is moved from a mandatory to a suggested dependency?

Giulio

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 2:15 PM Steffen Möller <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Actually, I appreciate your forward to this mailing list - it is some
> nice food for thought. We may yet have been mostly concerned about
> maintainability, less so on specifying fractions of workflows that
> complete workflows.
>
> @Gulio, are you are of the --no-install-recommends option to apt-get
> install? Would that allow you to circumvent your concern to optimise
> your docker image? Also, you can possibly remove all the binaries you
> don't need to reduce the final size of your image, right? Maybe you want
> to remove parts of packages after an installation, like in
> dpkg -L bcftools | grep '^/usr/share/doc' | xargs -r rm ?
>
> Olivier may have additional ideas.
>
> Best,
> Steffen
>

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