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

[Thomas Spuhler]

On Saturday, April 07, 2012 08:38:39 AM Guillaume Rousse wrote:
> 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 ?

I'd go for this.

> - 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'.

-- 
Best regards
Thomas Spuhler