Re: Installation of Recommends by default on October 1st

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Bruce Sass <bmsass@shaw.ca> wrote:

> dselect doesn't force you to install recommended packages; for as long 
> as I can remember (since Bo) it has given you a list with the 
> recommends preselected, and a simple keypress is all that is needed to 
> decline them.

I'm afraid your memory is not serving you well here. I've been using
Debian since the time where slink was in "frozen" state, and I remember
very well that I had to wait a few years before being able not to
install Recommends. Looking at the changelog, it seems the change (in
dpkg trunk, not in stable releases!) dates from November 1999:

Sun Nov 28 21:56:32 CET 1999 Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@debian.org>

  * dselect/pkgdepcon.cc: don't treat recommends like (pre-)depends.
    Instead make it similar to suggests but default to selecting the package.

For the sake of History, ;-)

-- 
Florent