Hi Michael,
I have noticed you are involved in the packaging of the bcftools software as a debian package. I am not sure whether you are the right person I should address, but if not maybe you can help me find who I should address instead.
I have been working with bcftools and in particular with dockers that must run bcftools inside. This is all made very simple by the bcftools debian package. However, I have noticed that the approach of installing bcftools as a debian package causes apt-get to also pull perl and perl modules which cause the docker image to increase in size significantly. The bcftools package contains a handful of python and perl binaries, but the main software is written in C and has very few dependencies. Currently python is a suggested dependency, while perl is a mandatory dependency. This seems a bit inconsistent. Could the perl dependency also be made optional? This would go a long way making it easier to generate minimalistic docker images with a minimal footprint using apt-get.
All the best,
Giulio