[Mageia-dev] painful discussion n°1: debloating

[Guillaume Rousse]

If thos of you lucky enough to have missed the beginning of the story, 
here are the importants parts:
- first round: bug #4357, still marked as release blocker (despite a bit 
excessive IMHO)
- second round: discussion on -dev, archived here:
https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-dev/2012-March/013342.html

The whole issue turns around the unfortunate consequence of adding new 
dependencies, for various reasons, between packages and in installer: 
bloated minimal installation. In this case, this is about a specific 
*soft* dependency from gnome-keyring to seahorse, which has painful 
consequences, as outline by TV in comment #5 of the original report.

Suggestion sofar for this initial problem have been suggested:
1) move the gnome-keyring -> seahorse soft dependency either in 
task-gnome, or task-gnome-minimal
2) turn the mandatory dependency between libgnome-keyring to 
gnome-keyring into a soft dependency
3) remove the dependency on a gnome component from the KDE category in 
the installer

But sofar, nothing was done AFAIK, the bug is still open.

 From my own personal and biased reading, solution #3, makes sense. 
Actually, it would only adress a part of the problem, as installing the 
distribution doesn't mandatorily means 'running the installer'. chroot 
installation, for instance, or automated installations, are not affected 
by rpmsrate, but still face side-effect of those nasty 'useful' 
dependencies between packages. Of course, this only concern expert 
users, who usually know about --no-suggest urpmi option.

Solution #1 would also make some sense for me. As pointed out by TV, you 
don't mandatorily install gnome-keyring because you need it, but because 
you don't have the choice, and something else introduced it without 
asking you. That's a bit difficult to argue in this case that you may 
need seahorse to manage your keys, merely because you problably never 
intended to store keys anyway. So I'd also implement this solution, 
despite once again, if you really care, you may use --no-suggest also.

Solution #2, tough, would introduce some precedent. AFAIK, all gnome 
libs unfortunatly require their binaries to be installed alongside to be 
used, for I can't remember technical reason. So, I'd rather reject it.

To summarize it:
- has anyone any opposition to remove the totem-mozilla - KDE 
relationship in the installer ?
- Olav (or anyone else), do you have any objection to *also* move the 
soft dependency from gnome-keyring to seahorse to either task-gnome or 
task-gnome-minimal ?

More generally, we still lack a clear view of interactions between 
choice hardcoded in installer rpmsrate, and two different kind of 
dependencies between packages. And a general policy on this kind of 
issues, aiming a correct balance between 'avoinding poor users the pain 
of installing additional stuff themselves' and 'keeping system minimal'.
-- 
BOFH excuse #189:

SCSI's too wide.