On Mon 2017-06-19 19:24:22 +0100, Andrei Morgan wrote: > ok, I figured it out following the bugreport: when I upgraded, I was > manually required to install monkeysphere. When I manually install, I > generally use the option --no-install-recommends in order to keep > bloat out of my system (which variously suffers anyway).
But if you keep out "recommends" it's generally presumed that you have a
sense of what you specifically need the program for, and which use cases
you won't need.
In the monkeysphere case, it's perfectly reasonable (for example) for a
minimalist server to not install agent-transfer, because it does not
expect (or even want) users to manipulate secret keys on the host. That
is, "monkeysphere subkey-to-ssh-agent" would never be run on that host.
So in that installation, having monkeysphere Depends: agent-transfer
would itself be the bloat that you say you're trying to avoid :)
> Turns out package 'agent-transfer' is recommended rather than a
> dependency. I realised this after seeing a similar problem with GPG and
> finding bug #845720 where dkg highlights the differences between
> Recommends and Depends.
>
> I believe 'agent-transfer' should be a Depends and therefore this is a
> bug in the debian package.
I'm closing this bug report because i think the Recommends: and Depends:
are correct. for the standard user, they'd expect to have it available,
as Andrei did. This is what Recommends: is for, explicitly.
Users who want a more minimal ("less bloated") system that don't need
all the commonly-used features can use no-install-recommends and
manually include the packages necessary to get the features they're
looking for.
Regards,
--dkg
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