Comment 2 for bug 1540425

------- Comment From <email address hidden> 2016-02-02 11:07 EDT-------
Hi Dmitri,

(In reply to comment #5)
> Would it be acceptable to ship ziomon in universe, instead of in main (and
> thus installed by default)?

ziomon does not need to be installed by default. It makes sense for SCSI-only and mixed SCSI/DASD installations. The documentation should be updated so that administrators, performance users know to install it when required.

I presume you pursue the ziomon subpackage approach.

>
> The reason behind this is the dependency chain.
>
> The proposed patch adds a Depends on "blktrace", which is in universe, and
> in turn depends on libtheora-bin & libav-tools (both in universe).

On my Debian, it is strictly not a depends, rather than recommends:

Package: blktrace
State: not installed
Version: 1.1.0-2
Priority: extra
Section: utils
Maintainer: Bas Zoetekouw <email address hidden>
Architecture: s390x
Uncompressed Size: 1075 k
Depends: libaio1 (>= 0.3.93), libc6 (>= 2.15), python, lsb-base
Recommends: libtheora-bin, libav-tools, librsvg2-bin
Suggests: gnuplot-x11

>
> libav-tools come from a highly vulnerable package, which Ubuntu Security
> team deems as unsupportable.
>
> I shall look into unwinding / reducing these dependencies, to have a
> possibility of including ziomon in main without the feature to generate
> H.264 videos.

I think that such low-level tools like blktrace should not install video-related packages. So if you have some time it would be great to rethink whether these dependencies/recommends are really necessary and makes sense?