[debhelper-devel] Bug#822423: debhelper: is there any way to reduce the impact of the dh-autoreconf dependency?

[Stephen Kitt]

Package: debhelper
Version: 9.20160403
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

With the introduction of the dependency from debhelper to
dh-autoreconf, non-development systems with debhelper installed (in my
case, because of equivs) suddenly end up pulling in the autotools
suite and gcc. That’s “only” ~230MB but it seems unfortunate... It’s
not directly relevant since the correct solution is to stop installing
equivs, but many companies forbid installing gcc on servers. (And no,
I’m not running testing on servers.)

Is there any way of reducing the dependency’s impact? Or is it not
worth it?

Regards,

Stephen


-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (200, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.4.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  autotools-dev            20150820.1
ii  binutils                 2.26-8
ii  dh-autoreconf            12
ii  dh-strip-nondeterminism  0.016-1
ii  dpkg                     1.18.5
ii  dpkg-dev                 1.18.4
ii  file                     1:5.25-2
ii  libdpkg-perl             1.18.4
ii  man-db                   2.7.5-1
ii  perl                     5.22.1-10
ii  po-debconf               1.0.19

debhelper recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debhelper suggests:
ii  dh-make  2.201605

-- no debconf information