Bug#982313: grub-common: excessive dependency on mtools

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 06:00:45PM +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:
> In response to #774910, grub-common gained a dependency on mtools, but I
> do not think this makes much sense.  Creating a rescue disk with
> grub-mkrescue also requires xorriso, so the dependency on mtools alone
> is useless.
> 
> Personally I rely on third party rescue systems like GRML and do not use
> grub-mkrescue at all, so I think mtools should be demoted to Suggests,
> like xorriso.  Having both in Recommends might sense as well, but a hard
> dependency looks excessive.

On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 01:18:55PM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote:
> I agree; I think it'd be perfectly reasonable to have Recommends on both
> mtools and xorriso, but a hard dependency suggests that grub can't work
> without them. grub works fine without either mtools or xorriso
> installed; one utility, grub-mkrescue, doesn't. There's plenty of
> precedent in other packages, especially common packages that many people
> will have installed, for using Recommends for packages needed by one of
> many scripts within a package.

These are reasonable points, given that grub-common is installed nearly
everywhere and grub-mkrescue is not so frequently used.

I think what I'll do is drop mtools to Suggests alongside the existing
xorriso, but add a note to the package description indicating that
grub-mkrescue needs those packages (with a UEFI caveat in the case of
mtools).  This is still more of a package relationship than existed
before I dealt with #774910, and means that a simple "apt show" will
explain the situation.

If the two opposing requirements remain in tension after that, then I
think the way out is likely to be a separate binary package called
something like grub-tools or grub-utils that can hold things like
grub-mkrescue and grub-mkstandalone.  However, it's too late in the
bullseye release cycle for that option to be available just at the
moment.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at debian.org]