On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 08:35:10PM +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote: > > To to be clear, the key metric for your specific goal is the reduction > > of the _source_ package count since the goal is to reduce the number > > of packages which have to be built by "hand" (or by script), before > > you can create a sbuild/pbuild build chroot, correct? > > Correct. Unless I am mistaken, removing e2fsprogs from the build set > also removes fuse.
Apologies for the thread necromancy, but I was going through old bugs and old todo items for e2fsprogs debian package, and I was rereading this thread as part of that. This probably doesn't help much, but for people who are doing things by hand, you can skip the dependency on fuse by unpacking the e2fsprogs source packaging, adding the file debian/rules.custom which contains the single line, "SKIP_FUSE2FS=yes", and building by hand. It currently doesn't automatically fix up the control file, but I can set things up so that adding the rules.custom file with SKIP_FUSE2FS=yes, and running "./debian/rules debian-files" will automatically rewrite the control file dropping the fuse2fs dependencies and the "fuse2fs" package from the control.in file. Which might not matter that much, since when bootstrapping a new architecture, it's all done manually anyway, so having a properly update debian/control file might not matter that much. (The rules.custom infrastructure in e2fsprogs's debian/rules file was something I had put in a while ago to support building subsets of e2fsprogs for certain specialized use cases at $WORK. It was also used way back when to support building new versions of e2fsprogs on extremely ancient old-old-old-old-stable.) Yeah, it's horribly manual, but when you need to bootstrap a newn architecture, it's all manual *anyway*. And yes, it's a workaround compared to dropping e2fsprogs from the essential set (for which I still support), but it's a workaround that works today. I suppose the real problem is that a random developer who is trying to bootstrap Debian on a new architecture won't know about this trick, but in case it's helpful, I thought I would mention it. (Waving to the RISC-V folks.) Cheers, - Ted