On 6/28/23 19:54, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
Because Recommends and Supplements are installed by default, we need
to be careful and use them sparingly, only when it really makes sense
for some package to be pulled in for almost all users of another
package. Thus far, Fedora and RHEL have done a good job of this,
primarily because we were very late to the weak dep party and have
had much more time to learn best practices and much less time to
screw up. This is in contrast to some other distros where it's common
for users to disable weak deps to avoid "bloat." We don't ever want
our Recommends/Supplements to be considered bloat. (That's what
Suggests/Enhances is for. :) And since they're not bloat, they should
be respected when building most non-minimal images.
I agree.
Do you consider the removal of tzdata to be a valuable use of Recommends?
It is my opinion that glibc should Recommends: tzdata because it frees up an optional
~8MiB of zoneinfo that will never be used by UTC-only microservice workloads. It is
a further refinement of having really small containers with LANG=C.UTF-8/C and TZ=UTC.
Some spec files will need BuildRequires: tzdata, because their %check and testsuite
run needs it. In addition to this we should continue to adopt Fedora CI and test the
results as required in an installed scenario (with or without tzdata as your package
might need to test).
--
Cheers,
Carlos.