grub depends on libfreetype6

[agent 8131]

grub depends on grub-common which depends on libfreetype6 from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04. I suspect this dependency is not needed and is best left uninstalled in server environments.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

It's used by /usr/bin/grub-mkfont, which is needed in order to have custom fonts on the boot menu. This is not a common use case, but it's one that we want to support, including on servers, especially for the benefit of users whose language isn't supported by the default font. And I don't think that splitting the grub-common package just to get rid of the libfreetype6 library dependency makes sense - it's just a font library, it's not like it pulls in X. So the cost of splitting it outweighs the benefit IMHO and I think it should be left as-is.

[agent 8131 (agent-8131)]

I agree that splitting it into yet another package would be silly. Perhaps I should have been more clear. By removing the dependency I meant changing it from Depends to Recommends which seems to be the correct relationship as it is clearly not an absolute relationship.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Fair enough, though that does make the packaging a bit more complicated as well. Bug reopened.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for grub2 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]