What else must I do to avoid installing "suggests"? Was: How to get a "minimal font set"?

[Kynn Jones <kynnjo@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 11:03 AM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> Find a file somehow belonging to the font you are interested in.
>> Do "dpkg -L <file name with path>" on it.
>            ^^
>            -S

Thank you, that is a useful tool.

When I ran `dpkg -S` over all the files reported by `fc-list`, and
then ran `aptitude why` on the reported packages, I discovered that
most of the superfluous fonts in my system came through packages that
were only suggested by other packages.

In fact, in many cases, the font-containing package is at the end of a
chain of suggests, where each link in the chain is a suggests of the
previous link.

IOW, I have a ton of junk in my system, not just superfluous fonts.

How can this be, given that I never use the `--install-suggests` flag
when I run `apt-get install`, and I don't have `Item:
APT::Install-Suggests` in my `/etc/apt/apt.conf`?

I must have some big gap or error in my understanding of Debian
package management and/or how `apt-get` works...

What else do I have to do to avoid having all these suggested packages
somehow get through to my system?

Thanks in advance!

kj