FS#68524 - [gtk3] Discussion about dependencies

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Chris (cs_95cc64dd) - Wednesday, 04 November 2020, 16:11 GMT
Last edited by Doug Newgard (Scimmia) - Thursday, 19 November 2020, 23:50 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

The purpose of this issue is to discuss some options to lighten the dependencies needed for minimal desktop installs.

I've done my best to get up to speed on the history of gtk3 and pretty much everything else that comes with an extremely minimal lxde install. It seems  FS#50513  split gtk3 into separate packages in Aug 2016, citing the same concerns I have. A year later in Nov 2017 the changes were reverted by  FS#56445 , which referenced a large number of duplicate issues  FS#56139 , examples being examples being  FS#51425 ,  FS#52454 ,  FS#51602 . But these issues are what I would expect, applications which require printing should depend on (or dynamically support) a printing package explicitly. My take on things thus far is that when the package was renamed the first time there wasn't enough coordination / updates with other packages, leading to some churn and bug reports. It also seems that as new features are desired the current pattern is just to add them to the base package (cloudproviders).


It didn't take me too long build my own version of gtk3 using the existing one as a template as suggested in my original forum post[1]. My immediate thoughts before building a pkg:
- Split gtk3 into gtk3 & gtk3-print-backends
- Sed every single instance of gtk3 to gtk3-printer-backends
- From here we can curate packages over time that don't need printer support at all to just use gtk3.


But after seeing how flexible the package system is I'm thinking there must be a way we could do a little better. Maybe we could get something like: "anyone who installs cups has printing, the end"? Packages might depend on libcups, but installing libcups does _NOT_ require or install any daemons. I also realize that gtk3 is just the top package and that there will be work to be done in other packages, a couple big culprits are libcups / avahi[2]. Avahi will arguably impact these efforts more than changing gtk3 itself I think, it should be split into 4+ packages at the very least (libavahi-{choose-your-effort-level}, avahi-{daemon,discovery?,...?}), we could also discuss that here or I can make a separate issue for that.

Any initial thoughts from the maintainers? I'm happy to help with the efforts here, in even the most tiny incremental steps. If this is a hard "nope", could we instead discuss some best practices moving forward to keep further bloat (surface area) out of what could (arguably should) be library packages?


[1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=260304
[2] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/avahi/
This task depends upon

Closed by  Doug Newgard (Scimmia)
Thursday, 19 November 2020, 23:50 GMT
Reason for closing:  Not a bug
Additional comments about closing:  As noted, this was already tried and the maintainer decided not to continue with it. There's nothing new in this ticket.

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