(Cc'ing a few related package maintainers) Hi!
After receiving several bug reports about busybox-static package and its issues initrd, a bigger question come to mind -- Why do we need these statically-linked utilities these days? Back in 1990s, it made some (little) sense, -- computers were different, filesystems were different, crashes were often and so on. So, under some circumstances, having statically-linked set of utilities which you can use to repair a badly damaged filesystem, when your /bin is broken, - it was good to have. So we have busybox-static, sash, e2fsck-static, bash-static, even zsh-static. Please note these utilities had to be installed before the recovery, and the user should know about them to begin with. So even there, when they made some sense, there were just a few people who actually used these. Now, systems has become much more reliable, rescue is usually (and better!) done while booting from a separate rescue media, and there are many other filesystems in use - value of this set of utils becomes very questionable. It is even more: almost no system these days works without initrd. And initrd almost always includes (a regular build of) busybox. Which might serve as a minimal rescue tool *outside* of the main system. So having static versions of these utils on the main system becomes even more questionable. I think there's no reason to keep building these static versions of rescue utilities in 2026, finally. In particular, I'm thinking about dropping busybox-static, keeping just the regular busybox binary. Do we still need bash-static, e2fsck-static, even zsh-static? My opinion is that we might drop these too. For busybox, I filed https://bugs.debian.org/1147074 Thanks, /mjt
