Package: systemd Version: 247.3-3 Tags: bookworm sid systemd used to include systemd-timesyncd. Now it is split out to a separate binary package. Thanks. However, systemd now depends on systemd-timesyncd, so we cannot really remove it (unless installing something like ntp). For containers, having a time-daemon is not useful and we want to reduce the filesystem as much as possible. Therefore it would be good to reduce the dependency to Recommends.
Michael pointed out however that doing so would break installing systemd-timesyncd by default as debootstrap does not honour Recommends. It does however use the Priority and a default debootstrap will include Priority: important packages. So how about demoting the dependency to Recommends while simultaneously bumping systemd-timesyncd's Priority to important? Of course this can only implemented post bullseye, because that is the first release to ship a systemd-timesyncd separate at all. Demoting it now would risk loosing it in upgrades. Besides that, the change would be inappropriate to the freeze policy. Helmut