to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > 
> > But Andy Smith wrote recently that "installing without recommends is not a 
> > supported use
> > case" and I believe him.
> 
> FWIW, I do install with no-recommends in general:
> 
>   tomas@trotzki:~$ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/95no-recommends 
>   APT::Install-Recommends no;
> 
> "Not supported" seemed a bit strong to me: what does mean "not
> supported" in a non-commercial distro, anyway?
> 
> I'd prefer to say: not recommended for newbies. The problem with
> you is that you want to be a newbie and not a newbie at the same
> time.
> 
> This doesn't work :)

Oh, I'm a rare kind of newbie. I have 25 years of FreeBSD
experience and about 10 years of Solaris experience. However I still
consider myself a newbie in Linux as I work with it only since 2020
and in rather limited ways.

> 
> In the concrete case: some newbie would expect to have the GUI
> tools installed when (s)he installs KVM. Some other not. Since
> APT doesn't (yet) support mind reading (alas, the proprietary
> drivers and that), the GUI tools are recommended.

That's what documentation is for! If a newbie wants an installation
without GUI, they look for a how-to about headless installation.

It's a pity I came across https://wiki.debian.org/KVM only after I had
already posted to the list. I think this page covers my case. I really
with that the first reply to my question had been a link to this page, it
could have saved a lot of electrons and carbon.

> 
> That's what "recommends" is for. You can switch it off, even
> in general (see above), but then you'll have to be prepared to
> look into package descriptions and come up yourself with "oh,
> perhaps I want to install that, too".

Yes, sure.

-- 
Victor Sudakov VAS4-RIPE
http://vas.tomsk.ru/
2:5005/49@fidonet

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