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

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Fri 04 Mar 2016 at 23:15:28 (-0500), Bob Bernstein wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Mar 2016, Joel Roth wrote:
> 
> >cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/40nosuggestrecommends
> >Apt::Install-Suggests false;
> >Apt::Install-Recommends false;
> 
> Nice. Done. Thanks.
> 
> I had reason a couple of nights ago to consult 'man apt-get' because
> it seemed that lots of "suggested" pkgs were being installed. The
> two relevant options I found on the man page:
> 
> --no-install-recommends
> and
> --install-suggests
> 
> lead me to believe that the desired default behavior is to go ahead
> and install 'recommends' but not 'suggests'.

That's logical. The options listed all make it do something different
from the normal behaviour with one exception: --list-cleanup is the
default. I don't know why they picked on that one.

> When as an experiment I added "--no-install-suggests" (not in the
> man page afaik) to an apt-get commandline, I was surprised that no
> error message leaped up i.e. I did not see "no such option."

My man page starts thus:

OPTIONS
       All command line options may be set using the configuration
       file, the descriptions indicate the configuration option to
       set. For boolean options you can override the config file by
       using something like -f-,--no-f, -f=no or several other       <--- second in the list is --no-f
       variations.

       --no-install-recommends
           Do not consider recommended packages as a dependency for
           installing. Configuration Item: APT::Install-Recommends.

       --install-suggests
           Consider suggested packages as a dependency for
           installing. Configuration Item: APT::Install-Suggests.

Cheers,
David.