On Sun, Feb 02, 2020 at 07:54:42PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote: > Hello, > > On Sat 01 Feb 2020 at 11:59AM -08, Russ Allbery wrote: > > > Ansgar <[email protected]> writes: > > > >> Is the current wording in Policy not sufficient? In 3.8 Essential > >> packages it states "this flag must not be used unless absolutely > >> necessary" and later "You must not tag any packages essential before > >> this has been discussed on the debian-devel mailing list and a consensus > >> about doing that has been reached". > > > > I think Josh is arguing that ideally we'd slowly move towards declaring > > dependencies on essential packages explicitly, so we should indicate that > > in Policy and, as a first step, say that we're not adding any entirely new > > functionality to the essential set if we can help it and instead asking > > people to just declare explicit dependencies. > > In this case, it doesn't seem like we'd need any new normative wording > in Policy -- I think Ansgar is right that the current text ensures that > we're not adding any new functionality to the essential set if we can > help it.
I think there's value in a bit of additional verbiage, which I suggested in a subsequent reply. - Josh Triplett
