On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 12:15 AM Carlos O'Donell <carlos(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On 6/26/23 16:12, Fabio Valentini wrote:
> So all this considered, I'm not sure whether this change is actually
> worth it, if tzdata databases of some form will likely be pulled into
> installs anyway.
Quoting the "Weak Dependencies Policy":
"Weak dependencies allow smaller minimal installations while keeping the default
installation feature rich."
The change is worth it for minimizing container runtimes based on Fedora.
Just for clarity, a default install will always have tzdata.
> I'd rather have *one* tzdata that's up-to-date and used by everything
> (for example, so Python and Ruby programs can actually agree what time
> it is).
I agree strongly with this statement.
I have worked with Patsy over the years to remove as many bundled copies of out-of-date
tzdata as we can find :-)
It is important for consistency that all language runtimes have the same concept of
time.
This change request does not change that.
Thanks for the clarification, though this is only partially reassuring:
I'm not sure how this accounts for the fact that there are some
situations in which weak dependencies are *not installed at all*.
Most notably, they are not installed into build environments *at all*
(i.e. mock sets `install_weak_deps=0`).
I'm not sure how the process that builds ISOs and container images
handle this, but I assume they set this option as well.
So we'd need to be careful not to remove "hard" dependencies on tzdata
and replace them with lots of "weak" dependencies all over the place -
just to find out that it ends up missing from important places because
they disable weak dependencies.
Fabio