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

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2025-09-09, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> 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).
...
> 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.
...
> # 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?

The fact that both packages mostly only really differ in the number of
recommends seems a bit silly to me honestly!

Admittedly, diffoscope has such a broad spectrum of file type support
that a package that hard-depended on even a subset of them might be a
difficult judgement call...

What is the actual use-case for diffoscope-minimal vs. diffoscope?

At least from my perspective, I would prefer a split:

  diffoscope -> recommend all the things
  diffoscope-minimal -> suggest all the things

Then "diffoscope-minimal" is truely opt-in and you explicitly pull in
the features you are actually interested in, and "diffoscope" pulls in
all (or nearly all) the recommended features, and you selectivly opt-out
of the features you do not want...


live well,
  vagrant
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