Simon McVittie:
On Sat, 26 Sep 2026 at 10:10:28 +0200, David Prévot wrote:But we also want to allow packages to not bring those dependencies in the rare cases where the maintainer has checked that they are not needed in the normal use of their package (e.g., they’re just a nice feature, but the package would still be usable in most cases without them).The dbus-daemon package might make a convenient concrete example of a non-Essential package where the tmpfiles.d snippet is nice to have (it allows dbus-daemon to run successfully from an empty/factory-reset /etc and /var), but not mandatory. In forky/sid it currently has a hard dependency on a tmpfiles.d implementation; in trixie, it didn't.[...] smcv
As I see it, a weaker dependency is a liability. If upstream changes their tmpfiles later (or add a new one), and the maintainer does not notice it then they will upload an RC buggy package. Even if it is a maintainer provided file, the file contents and the dependency weakening are not next each other, so people are bound to miss it.
I understand that keeping systemd-tmpfiles out of the (pseudo-)essential might be worth that liability from a distribution point of view. But I cannot derive that immediately from the `dbus-daemon` case. What do you gain by accepting this liability in the `dbus-daemon` package?
Best regards, Niels
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