Q: Why has this been implemented so suddenly? A: That's a good question, while we have discussed this topic multiple times in the past and also issued a concrete proposal to arch-dev- public (plus its follow-up summary) no further steps were taken to get something testable. However, during arch-conf in Berlin, the general enthusiasm and acceleration of the group was so strong, that we have warp-10 driven this task. We acknowledge that this could have been handled more carefully, but in the spirit of arch-conf please excuse us and bear with us. For instance, we could have noticed during a test phase the consequences of not having systemd- sysvcompat. For the time being, we have added it to the base package as the implications were not explicitly desired and discussed beforehand, however that topic will be covered in a follow-up. Q: Why has the group been superseded by a meta-package? A: The difference with the new base package is that this defines the level at which we tell you, you have modified your system sufficiently that you break it, you bought it -- it is your responsibility to debug issues caused by your overriding basic assumptions of the system. This has theoretically already been the case before this change as packages in the old `base` group were expected to be installed by a lot of packages. On the other hand, it has never explicitly been stated that this indeed is a requirement. The consequence is that packages may potentially misbehave or fail to properly install. Following this reasoning, it's a very natural choice to use a meta- package. It allows us to reflect changes (additions or removals) in the required package set straight on user installs with the next system upgrade which allows preserving the consistency of those assumptions. A simple example would be the systemd package, no matter what use-case you have (like a tiny container) we assume you must have systemd installed as its being relied on (sysusers, tmpdirs, etc.). Q: Why has it been shrunk down and doesn't contain $package anymore? A: The base meta-package is meant to be the lowest common denominator across different use-cases like desktop usage, bare-metal server or container runtime and therefore defines the foundation people can build their desired environment upon. The old base group did not just contain too many unnecessary packages for us to reasonably be able to call it the lowest common denominator, it was also inconsistent (for example it shipped reiserfsprogs but not btrfs-progs). After reflecting on all of the feedback so far, it also became quite clear that the old base group was kind of misused as a poor man's installer. There is nothing wrong with such a use case per se, but if there is a desire to solve this on our side, we should find the optimal solution instead of just sticking to some legacy. Be it an actual installer, something like a base-extras group, or nothing at all, it is out of scope here, but we should look into it separately -- so maybe its a bit of xkcd#1172. Q: Why couldn't we just add a new package and leave the base group as it was? A: The primary reason is that base (as the name indicates) shall be the minimal foundation and denominator of different use-cases. If we would introduce anything other than 'base' to fulfill this job, like base-system, base-minimal, base-foundation, or whatever one could come up with, it wouldn't get the point across as clearly as the name 'base' itself. The historic knowledge is mostly responsible for our bias here, but it is clearly easier to grasp the intention compared to the difference between having `base` and `base-minimal`. Q: Should we update the dependencies of our packages to depend on base instead of on its members? A: Nothing has changed in that regard and there is no strict rule for do or don't yet. This is in general more related to the topic of transitive dependencies which needs to be discussed eventually. My recommendation is to just keep the members that are a first-level dependency because there is absolutely no point in making every single package in the universe depend on the base meta-package. However, it can be correct, clean and useful to list your first-level dependencies explicitly instead of not at all. Q: What happens next, are there any plans? A: The most important part was getting this abstract out to provide information and aid in resolving some of the confusion. The next steps will include multiple follow-up topics to iterate over and decide case by case -- for example how we want to handle systemd- sysvcompat and other topics that emerged. cheers