Just to share my experience: In ALTLinux, I ship automount functionality in separate subpackage 'freeipa-client-automount' as of IPA 4.7.1.

Does the installation of nfs-utils start any these services? AFAIK all NFS services are run on demand only. The mere presence of the package should not consume any resources on your computer (except for about 1.5 MB of disk space).

It is more of an attack surface story: do not install packages you don't need to be present. I am not against this proposal but I'd like to understand effects of it on existing releases.

For example, in RHEL we probably wouldn't like to do this split for RHEL < 10. Since upstream spec file template also maintains RHEL target, it needs to be modified to only do subpackage for Fedora and RHEL > 9.

Upstream tests expect the package to be present. May be those tests should be modified to ensure the subpackage is installed. But this would mean we have to deal with dependencies properly, so may be it is a good way to add 'Provides: ipa-client-automount' to existing subpackage on RHEL < 10 and have the requirement in the tests. This way tests would work for old and new environments.

@slev since you already have this more or less done, could you please take it over?

@abbra Totally agree with you about security.

Regarding RHEL. If you add Recommends: freeipa-client-automount to freeipa-client it will NOT break standard installations. In our systems, we turn off installation of recommended packages, so it suffices us.