Clarification on bare minimum for minimal templates

[Quser59]

I have seen:
https://groups.google.com/g/qubes-users/c/MqztfMzrC1s/m/BvjheMK-AAAJ
referenced in

Debian-10-minimal Configuration

I’m interested in converting as many of my Debian AppVMs as possible to debian-10-minimal-template to reduce their attack surface, and then documenting how to get to an ideal configuration for each qube function, so that other noob-intermediate users can also use the minimal template. The docs didn’t give me a good idea of how much tinkering would be required. So my question is twofold - Would anybody be interested in collaborating to document Debian-10-minimal configuration for different pop…

And I have seen @adw state:

I strongly recommend against removing any packages from a minimal template, since it’s already minimal. Doing so will almost certainly break things. If you want to know which packages you can remove from a non-minimal template, you should probably just take the opposite approach instead: Start with a minimal template and add only the packages you want.

However, I have tinkered with the minimal templates (and recall others stating on the mailing lists) and some of the ‘dependencies’ of the qubes packages aren’t needed. If I recall correctly there is also a small amount of unnecessary stuff within the minimal templates*.

*To attain a template which has the absolute bare minimum needed to work with qubes for sys-net.

Is this simply an issue with the qubes package dependencies?
Is there an issue with debian dependencies?

This is far from top priority, but it would be good to get a clarification on precisely how minimal the minimal templates are - so at the least the community can work to trimming them down even further (if possible).

As per mailing list, I understand others have tried but found it too much effort for the relatively minimal reduction in packages (and long term maintenance) - this is why I feel a clarification/more detailed information is needed so the community can resolve these issues.

[adw]

My advice was directed toward users. Users generally shouldn’t try to remove things from the minimal templates, lest they hurt themselves.

However, I’m generally in favor of the developers making minimal templates truly minimal in the first place. Historically, there has been a lot of “lobbying” to get people’s favorite things added to the minimal templates, which may partially explain the presence of anything unnecessary (related: https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#could-you-please-make-my-preference-the-default).