[pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#872368: gpgme: please adjust libgpgme11 dependency on gnupg package

[Pierre Ynard]

Dear maintainer,

I find myself with the same request as the original reporter; I will try
to answer your questions for myself.

> So let me ask you more about your motivation with this bug report
> here -- are you interested in having fewer packages installed? less
> software total? smaller disk images? something else?

I'm interested in less bloat, fewer packages, less software, less
administration burden, and also in particular no useless services
running whereas I'm never going to use them. Less is more. I'm also
interested in my freedom of choice not to install software, which I
just prefer not to install, for whatever personal reason that is; I
understand in general that you provide in your packaging good and
educated decisions and defaults, but I never take kindly to one that I
get stuck with with no way out.

The policy states that hard dependencies are for when they're needed to
provide a significant amount of functionality. mutt provides plenty of
functionality already without the option to GPG-sign emails and even
without checking email signatures. So from that point of view, it hardly
seems appropriate that mutt pulls unconditionally the whole GnuPG suite.

I understand if you think it's best to avoid setups with missing pieces.
To prevent this from happening unless it's really the user's choice, may
I suggest to introduce the dependency as a Recommends field, or even
something like a "Depends: gnupg | gpg" ?

Many mutt users do not do any secret key operation. I think those who
do need to create or setup a private key first - and probably put some
thinking into where and how to secure it - so extra manual setup is
required anyway. I would also suggest that this could be the step where
interested users would opt in to install the extra packages they need.

I hope this tells you more on what you were asking about, and that this
issue can move forward.

Regards,

-- 
Pierre Ynard
"Une âme dans un corps, c'est comme un dessin sur une feuille de papier."