This is a requirement because open-vm-tools is in main, and all its dependencies also need to be in main. In order to promote this package we need to go through the MIR process:
But taking a step back, I do not think that adding util-linux-extra as a dependency of open-vm-tools is the right way of tackling this issue. open-vm-tools itself makes not direct call to hwclock. open-vm-tools relies on the ability of the system to manage the clock, and that is something that should be available in any Ubuntu installation. hwclock was demoted to main for a reason that I do not know (sorry, did not try to figure this out yet), if we did this right, there should be an alternative option in main for that. If there is no alternative, we should consider promoting it and adding it to the seeds.
I see some confusion here. Let me try to be clear:
To add util-linux-extra as a runtime dependency of open-vm-tools we need to promote the util-linux-extra binary to main (it is in universe right now):
$ rmadison util-linux-extra
util-linux-extra | 2.38.1-4ubuntu1 | lunar | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
util-linux-extra | 2.38.1-4ubuntu1.1 | lunar-proposed | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
util-linux-extra | 2.39.1-4ubuntu2 | mantic/universe | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
util-linux-extra | 2.39.1-4ubuntu2 | noble/universe | amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
This is a requirement because open-vm-tools is in main, and all its dependencies also need to be in main. In order to promote this package we need to go through the MIR process:
https:/ /github. com/canonical/ ubuntu- mir
But taking a step back, I do not think that adding util-linux-extra as a dependency of open-vm-tools is the right way of tackling this issue. open-vm-tools itself makes not direct call to hwclock. open-vm-tools relies on the ability of the system to manage the clock, and that is something that should be available in any Ubuntu installation. hwclock was demoted to main for a reason that I do not know (sorry, did not try to figure this out yet), if we did this right, there should be an alternative option in main for that. If there is no alternative, we should consider promoting it and adding it to the seeds.