Bonus packages in fai-mirror

[Russel Hill]

We are building using fai-cd from a private package pool (a local subset 
of debian packages). Ordinarily, we build our private package pool by 
first building an ISO from more complete debian mirror. Then we 
post-process the access logs and built our private package pool from 
that list of packages. FWIW: This process has been working for us for a 
few years now.

We appear to be getting many spurious packages on our fai-cd. For 
example, aspell-en gets pulled in by fai-mirror and installed on the 
target system. Absolutely nothing in the package poolsdepends on 
aspell-en. The only thing I can see is that aspell-en is "Recommended" 
by some packages. However, there are other recommended packages that 
don't get installed.

aspell-en is only one example of a 'bonus' package. Our ISO has grown 
from 410MB with fai v3.1 to 560MB with fai v3.2.4. We can manually pull 
some of these spurious packages out but it's very tedious and time 
consuming.

Does anybody have a clue what might be causing this? I'd love a sensible 
explanation.

Thanks for the help.