Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
* Sven Joachim svenj...@gmx.de [100314 20:54]: Then you clearly don't understand the purpose of Essential. I understand the theory, I've just never seen the practical purpose of the current mechanism. Yes, it shortens Depends: lines but if the dependencies are not listed and the Essential tag is omitted, what actually goes wrong? The user removes the package and breaks their system. The problem is that Essential has three aspects: 1) Avoid people breaking their system by deinstalling the wrong parts. 2) Specifying a base set of functionality always available (with all those working if only unpacked...) 3) Reducing dependencies of other packages. The problem is that 1 and 2 are not exactly the same, and while 3 is a logical choice with 2, it is also done for 1. While removing mount or the pam stack from a stand-alone system is usually not a good idea, treating 1 and 2 the same means it hast to be installed in every chroot[1]. This increases minimal build chroot sizes massively for many simple packages. (And reducing it needs manual looking and testing to make sure which parts are needed and which not, as there are no dependencies). Hochachtungsvoll, Bernhard R. Link [1] Well, in practise you often need pam, because many packages need util-linux for some parts of the package, while other parts of the package need libuuid1 which needs passwd which needs pam, but that is another thing. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100316114254.ga19...@pcpool00.mathematik.uni-freiburg.de
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
On 14/03/2010 19:25, Steve Langasek wrote: On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 06:04:16PM +, Neil Williams wrote: Personally, I'm not that fussed about Essential anymore - Emdebian just removes the tag from any and every package automatically. No ill effects have been identified so far. Sometimes I wonder if Debian actually needs Essential any more for anything particularly useful or commonplace. Then you clearly don't understand the purpose of Essential. I have seen strange side-effects of Essential, especially when using multiple (pinned) sources (esp. stable+testing+unstable). Example is mktemp and diff which are (according to the tool I use for upgrade) regularly proposed for deinstallation and then proposed for reinstallation. Not that it is a big problem, tough. -- Jean-Christophe Dubacq -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4b9f8f6b.2050...@free.fr
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
On Feb 07, Luk Claes l...@debian.org wrote: The whole archive needs to be scanned to see if no functionality of e2fsprogs is used without (build) dependency. Dropping the flag itself is just uploading e2fsprogs AFAICS. Since Luk is on vacation, does anybody else have any ideas about how to do this? -- ciao, Marco signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
On Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:10:03 +0100 m...@linux.it (Marco d'Itri) wrote: On Feb 07, Luk Claes l...@debian.org wrote: The whole archive needs to be scanned to see if no functionality of e2fsprogs is used without (build) dependency. Dropping the flag itself is just uploading e2fsprogs AFAICS. Since Luk is on vacation, does anybody else have any ideas about how to do this? Unpacking packages, scanning the source for binaries contained in the relevant package. We have infrastructure to do that kind of thing with lintian and other tools. Probably the biggest barrier is someone to actually run the scan and determine what to try and find. Personally, I'm not that fussed about Essential anymore - Emdebian just removes the tag from any and every package automatically. No ill effects have been identified so far. Sometimes I wonder if Debian actually needs Essential any more for anything particularly useful or commonplace. Until you try to create a system smaller than a standard debootstrap, it doesn't seem to matter whether Essential exists or not, AFAICT. (Once you do try and get smaller, you're largely on your own anyway and Essential isn't really that helpful in my experience as the packages you're trying to remove from debootstrap are some of those tagged as Essential, like perl.) Any package can be removed if you're careful - a different kernel is trivial with BSD kernels to go into stable releases, a different libc isn't hard, busybox can replace coreutils - about the only thing you need to keep is dpkg because otherwise it's hardly Debian-based anymore. ;-) -- Neil Williams = http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ pgpXUtEvBh7eF.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 06:04:16PM +, Neil Williams wrote: Personally, I'm not that fussed about Essential anymore - Emdebian just removes the tag from any and every package automatically. No ill effects have been identified so far. Sometimes I wonder if Debian actually needs Essential any more for anything particularly useful or commonplace. Then you clearly don't understand the purpose of Essential. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100314182508.gb10...@dario.dodds.net
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
On Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:25:08 -0700 Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org wrote: On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 06:04:16PM +, Neil Williams wrote: Personally, I'm not that fussed about Essential anymore - Emdebian just removes the tag from any and every package automatically. No ill effects have been identified so far. Sometimes I wonder if Debian actually needs Essential any more for anything particularly useful or commonplace. Then you clearly don't understand the purpose of Essential. I understand the theory, I've just never seen the practical purpose of the current mechanism. Yes, it shortens Depends: lines but if the dependencies are not listed and the Essential tag is omitted, what actually goes wrong? It's one thing having a list of packages that can be omitted from the dependency list but having a tag in the control file (and Packages file) seems utterly pointless. With a little care, Essential is irrelevant. By all means keep a list of Essential packages but that list does not have to be derived from the package data or in the Packages file or need a package upload to modify; it could be somewhere in /etc/, making it easier to modify / ditch. The lack of the control field appears to have no ill effects, whether a list exists or not. Having the principle of Essential does mean that Emdebian can replace dpkg-divert and update-alternatives with shell scripts without having to change reverse dependencies but, in practice, it isn't that much of a gain. Anyway, the point of my comment was to avoid getting into that discussion again. I'm happy to ditch Essential when it gets in the way. -- Neil Williams = http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ pgpePVCeDCICq.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
On 2010-03-14 20:34 +0100, Neil Williams wrote: On Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:25:08 -0700 Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org wrote: On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 06:04:16PM +, Neil Williams wrote: Personally, I'm not that fussed about Essential anymore - Emdebian just removes the tag from any and every package automatically. No ill effects have been identified so far. Sometimes I wonder if Debian actually needs Essential any more for anything particularly useful or commonplace. Then you clearly don't understand the purpose of Essential. I understand the theory, I've just never seen the practical purpose of the current mechanism. Yes, it shortens Depends: lines but if the dependencies are not listed and the Essential tag is omitted, what actually goes wrong? The user removes the package and breaks their system. Sven -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87bpeq3cid@turtle.gmx.de
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
On Feb 07, Luk Claes l...@debian.org wrote: The whole archive needs to be scanned to see if no functionality of e2fsprogs is used without (build) dependency. So, how can this be done? -- ciao, Marco signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
Marco d'Itri wrote: Now that /sbin/fsck is provided by util-linux it should be possible to drop the Essential attribute from the e2fsprogs. How do we do this? The whole archive needs to be scanned to see if no functionality of e2fsprogs is used without (build) dependency. Dropping the flag itself is just uploading e2fsprogs AFAICS. Cheers Luk -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
Marco d'Itri wrote: Now that /sbin/fsck is provided by util-linux it should be possible to drop the Essential attribute from the e2fsprogs. How do we do this? Does that also mean initscripts will be dropping its dependency on e2fsprogs? Also, what new priority should it get? Debian Installer already ensures e2fsprogs gets installed if ext[234] are used, so from that PoV there's no problem. Cheers, FJP -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: e2fsprogs not esential anymore?
On Sunday 07 February 2010, Frans Pop wrote: Does that also mean initscripts will be dropping its dependency on e2fsprogs? Just see it's already been lowered to recommends (I had an older version of initscripts installed). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
