Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1269172
crontabs pulls in cronie which pulls in systemd which pulls in a bunch of other stuff
Last modified: 2016-11-24 09:10:14 EST
Description of problem: tl;dr: installing less pulls in systemd crontabs is described as a filesystem package: "The crontabs package contains root crontab files and directories.", but it requires /etc/cron.d, which is provided by cronie. This pulls in a whole slew of dependencies to be installed. Please consider co-owning the /etc/cron.d instead. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): crontabs-1.11-9.20130830git.fc22.noarch crontabs-0:1.11-11.20150630git.fc24.noarch
Why less requires crontabs? This looks suspicious.
It requires man-db, which requires crontabs.
Ah, that is a quite recent addition. The question is whether having some crontab installed (such as the /etc/cron.daily/man-db.cron in case of man-db) does not also mean that you want to have it run. At least that was always the expectation. I understand that in case of some minimal cloud images the situation might be different. But in that case perhaps there should be something like dummy-crond package that would satisfy the /etc/cron.d dependency for cloud. Other possibility would be to use weak dependency (Recommends) to pull cronie from crontabs.
This dependency doesn't actually enforce anything: it is always possible to have cronie installed and not enabled, or cronie installed and enabled, but systemd not running, in which case cronie doesn't run either. In this case I think the disadvantage of having a low-level tool like less pull in the whole stack is really high.
Dependencies are not there to enforce but to ensure that the user installing packages does not have to specify all the dependencies manually. As I said the problem needs to be solved differently than by simply cutting the dependency.
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