On 6/19/20 09:28, Brian wrote:
On Thu 18 Jun 2020 at 14:15:00 -0500, David Wright wrote:
On Wed 17 Jun 2020 at 20:48:50 (+0100), Brian wrote:
AFAICT, it appears Recommends are *always* installed using the Installer,
irrespective of preseeding. Not *sometimes*.
One or two counterexamples are:
openssh-server Recommends xauth ¹
popularity-contest Recommends gnupg
Neither recommendation was installed until after booting,
when I was installing xserver-xorg and mutt respectively.
There are one or two more, like pigz and secureboot-db, but these are
Recommends of Recommends, which might muddy the issue.
But this is during the part of installation run through apt-get,
not debootstrap, where the process is more transparent to the user,
but likely uninfluenced by debootstrap options.
I would like to reassess what I wrote; some of it is incorrect and some
could do with further examination.
> My observations indicate that the first claim does not work for
> installing the base system or additional software, but the second
> configuration is carried out.
"recommends=false" does not influence the behaviour of debootstrap. It
does not, as the Manual says, install recommended packages. It was
incorrect for me to claim otherwise.
Richard's concern is with tasksel's default installation of recommended
packages. In this case "recommends=false" does not modify tasksel's
default behaviour. I think this is because "recommends=false" only acts
on apt based operations. In other words, tasksel is not apt.
I notice that tasksel (= /usr/bin/tasksel) is a Perl program in which it
appears the "cmd" to be executed once selections are made (line 24 from
the end) is
apt-get -q -y -o APT::Install-Recommends=true -o \
APT::Get::AutomaticRemove=true -o APT::Acquire::Retries=3 install
I suspect that has something to do with the apparent fact that tasksel
ignores "recommends=false" from other sources. I also suspect that
editing that line would change the behavior in the desired direction.
From long-standing practice and inclination I have no wish to test this,
but someone else might.
I assume this would need to be done by skipping tasksel during
installation of the d-i minimal system, then altering and running the
installed tasksel after the post-install reboot.
Regards,
Tom Dial