[Pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#592902: gnupg: please provide additional binary packages without readline dependency

[Carsten Hey]

Package: gnupg
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

the dependency on libreadline6 which depends on readline-common costs
about 450 kb of disk space on minimal Debian installations (given that
apt is still installed).

Please consider building additional binary packages without the
dependency on libreadline.  Since dpkg depends on libbzip2 anyway adding
--without-bzip2 would not save any additional disk space.  Due the size
of the binaries, adding -Os to CFLAGS seems to be appropriate for
packages meant to be tiny replacements.

The configure part in debian/rules could be:

    build-tiny/config.status:
            dh_testdir
            (mkdir -p $(@D); cd $(@D); CFLAGS="-g -Os" \
                ../configure $(CONFARGS) $(HOSTARG) \
                --without-readline --without-libcurl)

Currently apt depends on debian-archive-keyring which depends on gnupg,
thus it would be required to build both, gnupg-tiny and gpgv-tiny to
save the dependency on readline.  After making apt depend on gpgv
instead of gnupg, just building gpgv-tiny seems to be sufficient.


Regards
Carsten