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Package: debian-installer
Version: 20100211+b1
(Note: I'm not sure that d-i is the correct package for this bug; please
reassign if needed.)
I want to install a minimal Debian/squeeze system. When the installer
presents the tasksel screen, I unselect everything, even "Standard
system utilities". Yet when the install is finished, I see that a
complete exim4 installation is present, and running. This is, to say the
least, inappropriate for a minimal install.
I found a couple of discussion threads referencing this issue:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=49816
http://www.pubbs.net/201003/debian/1016-fresh-debian-install-wo-exim.html
>From the looks of it, exim4 is installed because of a Recommends: by the
cron package:
Recommends: exim4 | postfix | mail-transport-agent, lockfile-progs
I believe the right thing to do would be to include in the base install
a minimal, non-daemon-ized, "dumb" MTA capable only of forwarding and
local delivery, to satisfy the mail-transport-agent dependency.
(Forwarding won't work out of the box, obviously, but for cron and other
system facilities, local delivery is all that matters anyway.)
It would make sense to install Exim if the user selects the "Mail
server" task, or perhaps even "Standard system utilities".
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On Saturday 17 July 2010, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> The obvious fix is to change popularity-contest to suggest instead of
> recommend, to avoid pulling in a MTA when popularity-contest is
> installed. Cc to the maintainer list to see if that is an interesting
> alternative.
It's only obvious if there is no good reason to have exim4 as a Recommends
for popcon. IMO the Recommends fits the policy requirements in this case.
> An alternative would be to change pkgsel/pre-pkgsel.d/90popcon to not
> install recommended packages. Looking at the svn source, this seem to
> have be the current setting in svn since 2009-12-24 (uploaded as
> version 0.27).
So the issue is already fixed in daily built images.
> Not convinced it is a good idea to not install
> recommended packages by default in d-i, thought, and suspect it is
> better to change the recommends for popularity-contest.
Recommended packages *are* installed by default. We're just making an
exception in this case as discussed in [1].
Given that the issue is already resolved, I'm closing this report. There is
no need for any change in popcon.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2010/02/msg00033.html
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