Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)

[Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org>]

Hi,

my impression is that too many packages use Recommends that should
really be Suggests.  As a random example: installing dracut as a
initramfs provider will pull in exim4... (dracut-core Recommends: mdadm
which Recommends: default-mta | mail-transport-agent).  This seems
really not ideal.

As a result many people seem to disable installing recommended packages
by default.  I believe we should be much more agressive in downgrading
dependencies to Suggests.

For example, very few packages should Depend/Recommend a MTA: if you
just send notifications (like mdadm), you would need a properly
configured MTA anyway or they just end up in a file nobody will ever
look at (I don't see local mail to root as very useful).

I suggest that only very few packages should Recommend a MTA: packages
that mainly deal with mail on servers in some way or another (for
user-facing applications, speaking SMTP to a remote SMTP server is
common enough that these shouldn't Recommend a MTA usually either).

Ansgar