On Monday 06 July 2009, Colin Watson wrote: > So does that mean you feel that the policy manual's description of > Recommends is wrong, or that Debian installations should be unusual by > default?
I don't think policy for Recommends is wrong, but I do feel it results to a hell of a lot of packages getting installed that are not actually needed/wanted in practice. IMO the special handling of Recommends in D-I so far was justified, especially as we did consciously compensate for not installing Recommends by default by adding them to the task definitions in cases where they were really needed/wanted. > Realistically, either (a) the Recommends were correct or (b) nobody was > going to bother fixing them until they started being installed by > default as policy says they should be. I feel that the change could have been discussed more before being implemented in tasksel, possibly with some coordinated effort to check the impact on _all_ tasks instead of just the Gnome desktop task and maybe filing bugs to fix the most problematic Recommends. At the very least the impact on or consequences for debian-cd should have been discussed *before* the change was made. > It's one thing to say that something is premature, but the previous > situation was just a deadlock. There have been improvements of the use of Recommends during Lenny. Maybe not as many as needed, but still. > debootstrap is a slightly odd case (because it's also used to construct > explicitly minimal systems, in which case the rules seem different) and > I've long been unsure about how it should behave. Maybe it just needs > an option for it. I can agree to some extend with debootstrap although you could also argue that we should be consistent, maybe with an expert option to _consistently_ ignore Recommends for those who want a bare minimal install. IMO there is no justification to treat packages installed by base-installer or other components using apt-install differently from those installed by tasksel. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
