[Bug 1829370] Re: Discuss further entries in essential which might instead be minimal

[Steve Langasek]

These are interesting suggestions, but note that two of these packages
are Essential: yes (and the third is Important: yes).  We will not
produce Ubuntu images that are missing Essential packages, as such an
image is unreliable with respect to correct behavior of packages
installed later (since Essential packages do not need to be declared as
dependencies).

So these are possible improvements to future versions of Ubuntu, but
this improvement must be handled as a migration which removes the
Essential flag.

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Title:
  Discuss further entries in essential which might instead be minimal

Status in livecd-rootfs package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I was comparing and analyzing a recent docker image for more things we
  could maybe drop to be more minimal.

  I found a few which are in platform.git/required that we might be able
  to move to minimal.

  Not sure what the best practice is here to minimize the container
  images - put it to minimal as recommends and then remove it in livecd-
  rootfs? Anyway that would be up to you, the discussion first ...

  
  #1 e2fsprogs
  For a cloud image and anything bootable with disks - absolutely.
  But for a container which by definition already comes on its FS without disk access.
  I think this could be dropped.

  #2 diffutils
  There is no call to diff other than the references from its own docu and bzdiff/zdiff, ...
  Now while we need bzip2/gunzip and such, we don't need bzdiff/zdiff.
  Should that be split and removed along with diffutils?

  #3 dash
  The comment says "Much faster default shell" whicih is right, but bash+dash in essential.
  Again probably ok for cloud-images and everything bigger, but for minimal container images one should do - which of them I don't know.

  
  I just was curious on those three after checking the image if they might be removable.
  (Triggered by danwest asking about images sizes)

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