[Jonas Smedegaard] > Tonight I nailed an issue caused by suppressed package recommendations: > https://bugs.debian.org/831502 > > Reporting bugs for systems deliberately broken wastes time!
I am sad you feel that way, and I get the impression that you assume all recommendations in Debian are correct and appropriate, thought I know you enough to realize that this is not the case. In my experience they are not. I assume the following knowledge is well known to you, Jonas, but it might give some relevant context to Richard. Many years ago, package recommends in Debian were treated as if they were suggests, ie not installed by default by apt. This was against the documented policy, and made recommends mostly useless, and in general considered a bug in Debian. Then finally, some years ago, apt was changed to install recommends by default, and the disk footprint of a Debian installation exploded. This was partly because of bogus recommends (that should have been suggests) and partly because of wanted recommends that were finally installed as they should be. It is hard to decide if a recommends fall into the class of bogus or wanted, and it is up to the package maintainer to decide when in doubt, but in my view it is some times useful to question if a package listed as recommended belong in suggests instead. So if you come across a package recommending something you suspect should be suggests instead, do not be afraid of reporting it as a wishlist bug report. When that is said, Jonas is absolutely right that dropping all recommends by default is not a smart thing to do, as we did spend the last few years since apt started to install recommends by default to clean up the packages recommends settings. There are still bugs, for sure, but they are fewer and further apart than they used to be. :) -- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen
