Bug#1005223: bad package dependencies, power button not working

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 09 Feb 2022 at 12:52:26 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 09.02.22 um 11:46 schrieb Luca Boccassi:
> > IMHO the current setup is fine. There are legitimate use cases of
> > minimal images and runtime environments where you just want to pull in
> > some tools, without the whole dbus system session.

I agree, and I think dbus as a hard dependency of systemd would be
inappropriate even if reimplementations like dbus-broker didn't exist.
A Recommends seems correct to me.

(I think you mean "system service" though: "session" means something
specific in a D-Bus context, and this is not it)

> An alternative could be to bump the prio of dbus to important.
> This way, a simple "debootstrap" would install dbus by default.
> 
> Simon, I have a vague recollection that we discussed this back then and that
> you weren't quite comfortable doing that (but you were ok with standard).

I don't remember my exact reasoning, but looking at the canonical definitions
of the various priorities in Policy, I think standard is proportionate.
dbus seems like part of "a reasonably small but not too limited
character-mode system", but does not seem to me like something that
"one would expect to find on any Unix-like system".

For Debian installed on "bare metal" or on a virtual machine, absolutely,
you'll usually want dbus; but debootstrap is not only for that use-case,
it's also for chroots and containers.

I also don't really have the spoons to deal with @1990sLinuxUser
complaining that D-Bus is being forced on them, which I think is what
we'd get if we promoted dbus to important.

    smcv