A problem with providing some global way of turning off recommends by default in d-i is that tasks are now being maintained with the implicit and explicit assumption that recommends are installed by default. So, if recommends are turned off, tasks can be broken in both subtle and obvious ways. Frans touched on this in his mail, but AFAIK the set of "required recommends" is much larger than busybox and libgl1-mesa-dri[1]. See tasksel's changelog for 2.79 for many more, and note that more will have a tendancy to be added over time. Also note that the (er, my) inability to keep track of such required recommends is why recommends were turned on in tasksel in the first place. Also, the gnome metapackage is being maintained with similar implicit and explicit assumptions about recommends. And reversing that may not be to the taste of the maintainers or users of the package. For example, I'm about to file a bug requesting that network-manager-gnome be demoted to a recommends. Knowing that recommends will be installed by default gives the maintainer the ability to support such tweaks while still being sure that users who install the package will get a usable and standard gnome system. If the maintainer has to worry about users who choose to disable all recommends, he will be forced to keep network-manager a depends. Thus, supporting users who want to disable all recommends tends to reduce the total configurability of Debian. IMHO the best we can do is to implement the option, but document it as likely to install a broken system unless the user manually knows just what missing bits to install. Or not implement the option, which seems equivilant from here. (BTW, did you notice the annoying samba questions when installing the desktop task? It was an unncessary recommends in cups, which was quite quickly fixed once brought to the package maintainer's attention.) -- see shy jo [1] Which is still listed explicitly in the desktop task, actually.
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