Michal Čihař - Bloating dependencies

Bloating dependencies

It looks like many peoples decided it is right time to bloat my system with stuff I don't use.

The first think I did not like when squeeze went out was libpcsclite1 pulling pcsd and hal into my system. This is being solved on two fronts - porting pcsd to udev (in #612971) and disabling libpcslite1 support in wpasupplicant. Both of them being good ideas.

What actually drove me to writing this post is today's update, where aptitude suddenly wanted to install whole latex and thus using about 760MiB of extra disk space. I know disk space is supposed to be cheap these days, but it's not that cheap with SSD in notebook. The culprit turned out to be doxygen, which up to now happily lived without single bit of latex, but now needs it (though temporarily according to changelog).

I know it is tempting to enable every possible feature in your package, but in same cases it is really not something what most of people would appreciate.

Comments

gregoa wrote on March 3, 2011, 11:42 p.m.

and doxygen-latex doesn't look that helpful:

$ dpkg -L doxygen-latex
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/doxygen-latex
/usr/share/doc/doxygen-latex/copyright
/usr/share/doc/doxygen-latex/changelog.Debian.gz
$

Greg wrote on March 4, 2011, 2:01 p.m.

Thanks for bringing this up.
This was one of the reasons Debian only stayed 15 days in my box. Major improvement cause it usually stayed a few hours before.
That and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614024 i reported.
(I see theres also http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=615633 now)

On the laptop-mode-tools: I might be weird but i dont get how can an application recommend or suggest one that gonna prompt me to remove itself when i try to install it.

On pcsd: i went for testing branch cause i want a rolling system. This issue was a major annoyance.
If Debian wants to go on with the CUT (Constantly Usable Testing) project, issues like this one should be addressed before entering the testing (or CUT repositories).
Good luck with that, i havent read all the discussions in the mailing list about how exactly this is gonna be implemented, but for people who want a rolling distribution like me, such issues are majorly annoying and sounds like you may want to rethink how unstable->testing works. At least if the CUT repositories arent different from testing's. Just my 2 cents.

Simon wrote on March 4, 2011, 6:01 p.m.

Dropping PC/SC support from wpa_supplicant is not a good idea. Some of us actually use 802.1x with smartcards, because it is one of the few secure authentication frameworks that also work out of the box with Windows.

wrote on March 4, 2011, 6:17 p.m.

Well the original idea is to use dlopen for smartcards, but somebody has to implement it...