Hello! I would like to breath some life into this bug report. I've been collecting information/brainstorming-ideas about minimal debian installation (debootstrap --variant=minbase) on https://wiki.debian.org/BusterPriorityRequalification
The e2fsprogs was one of the packages that where questioned if it really needs to be Essential: yes / Priority: required. It is also one of the largest packages in the minbase set. While making things non-essential is quite hard because there's no obvious path to take, as already has been discussed in this bug report I'd like to suggest starting with what I just did to the (src:util-linux) mount package. step 1: Switch from Essential: yes to Important: yes This will not be much of a change in practise. Higher level tools like apt etc will still not want to uninstall the package, but you can now uninstall it using dpkg without getting the 'are you really sure you know what you're doing' question. I'd say the most important difference is that according to debian-policy (which doesn't know anything about Important: yes) the package is now no longer Essential and thus other packages are now allowed to add dependencies where needed. step 2: Dowgrade from Priority: required to Priority: important This means e2fsprogs will still be part of every normal install, just not part of 'debootstrap --variant=minbase' (e.g. buildd chroots and other specialized systems). Pitfalls with this change would be that every package who needs something from e2fsprogs (eg. lsattr, chattr) during build phase must have a build-dependency on e2fsprogs or they will FTBFS. Given we're still early in the Buster development cycle, I would personally think this change is pretty safe to do now but depends on how much fuzz you're willing to stir up. I'd like to offer my help in fixing this (by filing bug reports and doing non-maintainer uploads where needed). Bonus step: consider chattr/lsattr move to util-linux? As I understand it, chattr and lsattr used to be ext-specific. Nowadays more filesystems seems to have implemented the same interface and thus made the tools useful in a broader scope. If I'm not mistaken in the past some tools that has been developed as e2fsprogs utilities has moved to util-linux once they've become generic enough. The chattr and lsattr tools seems to be widely enough used in debian (codesearch.debian.net says 133 packages match chattr for example), that it might be useful to keep these two tools in the Essential set while moving the rest out. Not sure how much work it would be, but maybe the chattr and lsattr implementations could move over to util-linux (upstream) and after we can transition in Debian to ship these utils in the 'util-linux' binary package? This is mostly just a thought on how 'step 2' could be simplified. I'm very keen on seeing this move forward, so I'd like to hear your opinion on it. I'm also willing to help out where needed so please speak up if you have any work in mind that needs to be done. Regards, Andreas Henriksson
