On Mon, 2026-09-07 at 11:56 +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote: > On 9/7/26 11:12, Benjamin Drung wrote: > > Would it be possible to rename busybox to busybox-static in the busybox- > > static package to make both packages co-installable? > > Yes, that would be one of the solutions. But a better solution, it looks > like, is to just drop busybox-static package entirely. It serves no real > purpose these days. >
As long as nobody complains about removing busybox-static I am fine with removing it as well. I had never the use case of needing busybox-static. > > One more question: You say that busybox-static should not be used in the > > initrd, but why does busybox-static ship an initramfs-tools hook to use > > it in the initrd? I assume that initramfs-tools might have similar > > issues when using with busybox-static. > > I think it was just for symmetry and/or due to inertia. And due to lack > of real attention to this matter for decades. We should've thought about > the relation between busybox and busybox-static packages long, long time > ago. Instead, we just marked the two to conflict with each other, in > order to fix some immediate issue, and that's it. > I looked at reverse dependencies of busybox-static, - most dependencies > are written as alternative -- > > Depends|Recommends: busyox | busybox-static > > this is because both provides similar set of applets in a same-named > binary (so reaming the binary is a bit more complicated). Some do it > in reverse order: > > Depends|Recommends: busyox-static | busybox > > so preferring the static build, but still accepting regular. These are > Ok too. What I found in debian/README.Maintainer: * static: For use in initramfs > But some actually depends on the static build, for example: > > lxc-templates: Recommends: busybox-static > > and especially: > > virtme-ng: Depends: busybox-static > > This one needs to be fixed. > > This is a more general question, -- I'll bring it up on debian-devel@. Yes, let's widen this discussion. One more thing (The W in the XY problem): I initially stumbled over this issue with busybox-static by running the dracut autopkgtest on Ubuntu infrastructure. On those ubuntu-standard were installed and ubuntu-standard depends on busybox- static. So we need to figure out why it was included there. -- Benjamin Drung Debian & Ubuntu Developer
