Re: Towards a Debian for minimalists

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Jonas Smedegaard]
> Tonight I nailed an issue caused by suppressed package recommendations: 
> https://bugs.debian.org/831502
>
> Reporting bugs for systems deliberately broken wastes time!

I am sad you feel that way, and I get the impression that you assume all
recommendations in Debian are correct and appropriate, thought I know
you enough to realize that this is not the case.  In my experience they
are not.  I assume the following knowledge is well known to you, Jonas,
but it might give some relevant context to Richard.

Many years ago, package recommends in Debian were treated as if they
were suggests, ie not installed by default by apt.  This was against the
documented policy, and made recommends mostly useless, and in general
considered a bug in Debian.  Then finally, some years ago, apt was
changed to install recommends by default, and the disk footprint of a
Debian installation exploded.  This was partly because of bogus
recommends (that should have been suggests) and partly because of wanted
recommends that were finally installed as they should be.

It is hard to decide if a recommends fall into the class of bogus or
wanted, and it is up to the package maintainer to decide when in doubt,
but in my view it is some times useful to question if a package listed
as recommended belong in suggests instead.  So if you come across a
package recommending something you suspect should be suggests instead,
do not be afraid of reporting it as a wishlist bug report.

When that is said, Jonas is absolutely right that dropping all
recommends by default is not a smart thing to do, as we did spend the
last few years since apt started to install recommends by default to
clean up the packages recommends settings.  There are still bugs, for
sure, but they are fewer and further apart than they used to be. :)

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen