Dear Friends,
As you may be aware of, the latest version of apt in unstable and
testing supports installing of recommends by default now. This feature
is currently turned off because there are some "Recommends" in the
archive that should really be "Suggests".
We, the APT Development Team, will change apt to install recommended
packages by default on October 1st. This should give enough time to
teams and maintainers to revise their packages and try to remove any
obvious mistakes and to update the infrastructure where required.
Apt will install recommends by default for new packages as if those
were depends. But it will not complain about unsatisfied recommends
on your system.
To turn this feature off, pass --no-install-recommends to apt or set,
in your apt configuration, APT::Install-Recommends=False.
Because it only affects new package installs on your currently
installed packages nothing changes. If you want to see what would
change if you had a system with --install-recommends please run:
# apt-get install --fix-policy --install-recommends
If you want to know what package causes the installation of what
recommends please run:
# apt-get install --fix-policy --install-recommends -o Debug::pkgDepCache::AutoInstall=true
Debian Installer is already ready for this move and so it shouldn't
affect the installation. It's currently disabling it, explicitely.
Thanks in advance,
Otavio Salvador
and Michael Vogt on behalf of the APT Development Team