Bug#757891: perl is now pseudo-essential

[Niko Tyni]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 09:21:32AM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
 
> with the latest util-linux in unstable depending on init-system-helpers,
> perl is now part of the essential package closure set, bloating minimal
> chroots by some 30 Megabytes.

Thanks for the update and sorry for not getting back to this sooner.

FWIW I think that growing the essential closure set this much is bad
enough that it should be considered a release critical bug somewhere.
The growth is significant for minimal cloud systems and the like.

I see the util-linux change may be reverted for jessie, as discussed in
#768315. That still leaves the base system growth (due to the rsyslog
dependency, and possibly others). Also, util-linux will probably
re-instate the dependency post-jessie so a proper fix is certainly needed.

I've since been convinced that moving File::Temp into perl-base is the
right thing to do. Securely creating a temporary file is both difficult
and a reasonable action for maintainer scripts to want to take, so
it makes sense to have that in the essential set. Using /usr/bin/mktemp
from Perl programs is unnecessarily hard and error-prone.

So I'm willing to move File::Temp and its recursive dependencies,
File::Path and File::Basename, into perl-base. I think growing the
Essential set this way needs a debian-devel discussion, and I intend to
raise that next.

I note that while deb-systemd-helper has a 'use File::Find' line,
it doesn't seem to actually use it anymore since commit 9af8007ebd6.
Michael, could you confirm that please?

The remaining question is timing. I don't think there's much risk for
regressions in growing perl-base (assuming a correct Replaces declaration,
of course), but we've just frozen so it's up to the release team if we
do it for jessie or not. Personally I'd prefer to do it for jessie.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org