Status of Required/Essential/Build-Essential in Debian

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2022-04-28, Chris Lamb wrote:
>> 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 fact that the list has been for the most part shrinking is part of
what made me excited to take the time to write it up. :)


>> 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.

Yes, there are definitely more problems and would be lovely to fix them
all! For apt's specific case I *think* solving those two issues might
be sufficient for apt.


live well,
  vagrant
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