Dear maintainer, I find myself with the same request as the original reporter; I will try to answer your questions for myself.
> So let me ask you more about your motivation with this bug report > here -- are you interested in having fewer packages installed? less > software total? smaller disk images? something else? I'm interested in less bloat, fewer packages, less software, less administration burden, and also in particular no useless services running whereas I'm never going to use them. Less is more. I'm also interested in my freedom of choice not to install software, which I just prefer not to install, for whatever personal reason that is; I understand in general that you provide in your packaging good and educated decisions and defaults, but I never take kindly to one that I get stuck with with no way out. The policy states that hard dependencies are for when they're needed to provide a significant amount of functionality. mutt provides plenty of functionality already without the option to GPG-sign emails and even without checking email signatures. So from that point of view, it hardly seems appropriate that mutt pulls unconditionally the whole GnuPG suite. I understand if you think it's best to avoid setups with missing pieces. To prevent this from happening unless it's really the user's choice, may I suggest to introduce the dependency as a Recommends field, or even something like a "Depends: gnupg | gpg" ? Many mutt users do not do any secret key operation. I think those who do need to create or setup a private key first - and probably put some thinking into where and how to secure it - so extra manual setup is required anyway. I would also suggest that this could be the step where interested users would opt in to install the extra packages they need. I hope this tells you more on what you were asking about, and that this issue can move forward. Regards, -- Pierre Ynard "Une âme dans un corps, c'est comme un dessin sur une feuille de papier."
