Status of Required/Essential/Build-Essential in Debian

[Chris Lamb]

Hey Vagrant,

> Lately, I've been trying to get a handle on the status of the really
> core packages in Debian, namely the essential, required and
> build-essential package sets. The first two are present on nearly every
> Debian system, and build-essential is the set of packages assumed to be
> available whenever you build a package in Debian.

Wow, this is an excellent summary of the status here — thanks! And
indeed, an explicit & extra thank you for taking the time to write it
up so it could be posted here — I made an analogous and scrappy list
for myself in ~2018 to target these high-value packages, but I was
now clearly in error in not taking the time to clean it up and share
it... :(

[..]

> The more difficult issue with apt is caused by toolchain bugs in
> doxygen:
>
> https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/issues/nondeterminstic_todo_identifiers_in_documentation_generated_by_doxygen_issue.html
>
> https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/issues/nondeterministic_ordering_in_documentation_generated_by_doxygen_issue.html

For the sake of completeness (we talked about this issue elsewhere
recently, Vagrant; this is for the benefit of this list/thread..),
although there are only two notes linked immediately above, I suspect
there are more than the two issues in doxygen, and the program could
well warrant a sustained attack... especially as it would affect a
*lot* of packages.

> krb5 has one really perplexing issue related to build paths triggering
> seemingly unrelated changes in the documentation, possibly toolchain
> related (sphinx? doxygen?):
>
>   differing build paths trigger different documentation
>   https://bugs.debian.org/1000837

Ooh, I can already tell I think I'm going to love/hate this bug... Will
keep my thoughts to #1000837.


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby at debian.org 🍥 chris-lamb.co.uk
       `-