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

Sat Apr 7 18:18:43 CEST 2012

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
+