Bug#1114739: diffoscope-minimal: make it actually minimal?

[Mattia Rizzolo]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2025 at 02:00:24PM -0700, Chris Lamb wrote:
> Richard Lewis wrote:
> 
> > i know i can remove recommends, but it's a chore as you  but can't
> > just blindly remove everything given that other packages may also
> > depend on them (eg gpg, e2fsprogs).
> 
> Agreed. However, I think the intention was that diffoscope-minimal would
> be *installed* with --no-install-recommends in the first place.

Mhh, not quite.

the binary package "diffoscope" itself also just "recommends" everything
else, so one could just use --no-install-recommends on that to achieve
said result, without using the -minimal variant.


IIRC the -minimal variant uses a curated, restricted list of packages in
the Recommends fields, described as:
    This -minimal package only recommends a partial set of the supported 3rd party
    tools needed to produce file-format-specific comparisons, excluding those that
    are considered too large or niche for general use.


Currently that expands to

Recommends: 7zip, aapt, abootimg, acl, apksigcopier, binutils-multiarch, bzip2, caca-utils, colord, coreboot-utils, db-util, device-tree-compiler, dexdump, docx2txt, e2fsprogs, enjarify, ffmpeg, fontforge-extras, fonttools, genisoimage, gettext, ghostscript, giflib-tools, gnupg-utils, gpg, hdf5-tools, html2text, imagemagick, jsbeautifier, libarchive-tools, libxmlb-utils, lz4, lzip, odt2txt, oggvideotools, openssh-client, openssl, perl, pgpdump, poppler-utils, procyon-decompiler, python3-pdfminer, r-base-core, rpm2cpio, sng, sqlite3, squashfs-tools, systemd-ukify, tcpdump, u-boot-tools, unzip, wabt, xxd, xz-utils, zip, zstd, androguard, python3-argcomplete, python3-debian, python3-defusedxml, python3-jsondiff, python3-progressbar, python3-pypdf, python3-pyxattr, python3-rpm, python3-tlsh (>= 3.4.1)

Where there aren't many I'd futher exclude, perhaps I'd consider
excluding the android-related packages, at most (this might already be
an oversight: apktool is excluded already, but not aapt, abootimg, etc)?

Technically, that list of made by excluding the tools listed here from
the complete list:

# Set of tools considered "large" in their installation size or too niche in
# their target users. This is so they can easily be excluded from installation
# if not required in most cases. Note that these are the names of the tools
# (ie. the keys in the EXTERNAL_TOOLS dict), not the package names.
HUGE_TOOLS = {
    "ghc",
    "ocamlobjinfo",
    "llvm-bcanalyzer",
    "llvm-config",
    "llvm-dis",
    "llvm-readobj",
    "llvm-objdump",
    "ppudump",
    "javap",
    "ssconvert",
    "apktool",
    "apksigner",
    "pedump",
    "radare2",
    "dumpxsb",
}



Richard, do you see anything in the above Recommends list that you
believe should not be recommended?

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
More about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-
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