Hi,
We were kindly provided (by some external community)
with suggestion to reach out Alpine Linux to look for
solution regarding our goals.

Q: Does Alpine package management yet distribution installer
refrain from elevating dependencies of every single package
to mandatory one while neither underlying hardware
nor Alpine setup user asks for functionalities provided by packages
elevated to mandatory?

The intention is to have in used setup package composition as lean
as possible. Lot of Linux distributions we could deal with so far
have the bad habit to elevate lot of unused staff to mandatory dependencies.
Neither underlying hardware has capabilities to support
addressed functionality nor user is asking for such.

This is big issue from system and user data integration point of view.

Alpine lead axiom “Small. Simple. Secure" raises 
the hope property pointed out above could be fulfilled here.

If by any way user finds some mandatory dependency
which in reality is to be classified as redundant one
(based on criteria mentioned above)
how easily is for user/administrator to get rid of it?

Best Regards
wu 39

Hi,

On 2022-02-10 15:20:06 +0100, Me irc-ing just this minute wrote:
> Q: Does Alpine package management yet distribution installer
> refrain from elevating dependencies of every single package
> to mandatory one while neither underlying hardware
> nor Alpine setup user asks for functionalities provided by packages
> elevated to mandatory?
> 
> The intention is to have in used setup package composition as lean
> as possible. Lot of Linux distributions we could deal with so far
> have the bad habit to elevate lot of unused staff to mandatory dependencies.
> Neither underlying hardware has capabilities to support
> addressed functionality nor user is asking for such.
> 
> This is big issue from system and user data integration point of view.
> 
> Alpine lead axiom “Small. Simple. Secure" raises 
> the hope property pointed out above could be fulfilled here.

Alpine in general is pretty minimalistic, but at the same time I don't
have the impression that *all* optional dependencies are cut out.
Sometimes it would degrade user experience too much.

> If by any way user finds some mandatory dependency
> which in reality is to be classified as redundant one
> (based on criteria mentioned above)
> how easily is for user/administrator to get rid of it?

You might consider looking into gentoo or funtoo and their flags system.
It's probably as close as you can get. Running your own package
repository for alpine would be an option as well, so that you can
package those few packages you don't agree with yourself.

W.

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.