Hi,
I am not a ggml maintainer.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2026 at 10:40:52PM -0500, Dan Letzeisen wrote:
> Please consider changing the -backends from Suggests to Recommends. The
> original reporter also has other ideas to solve the issue.
Your use case sounds reasonable to me. Just upgrading to Recommends
significantly increases the installation size (which may not matter when
you deal with LLMs).
> There's a few ways to solve this I can think of:
> 1) llama.cpp metapackages (IE llama.cpp-rocm, llama.cpp-cuda, etc)
> 2) Metapackages do it (IE apt install rocm has a recommends for
> libggml0-backend-hip)
> 3) Add Recommends for all backends to llama.cpp.
Let me add another one inspired from xorg. How about adding a binary
package libggml0-backend-all that depends on all other backends. Then
have every backend provide a virtual libggml0-backend. Then have
libggml0 Recommends: libggml0-backend-all | libggml0-backend.
The effect of this will change will depend on the situation.
1. Recommends enabled:
A. No backend installed: Will install all backends
B. Some backend installed: Will not install other backends
2. Recommends disabled: Will not install any backend
In particular, this allows doing like
apt install libggml0-backend-cuda llama.cpp
and it'll install just that one backend with or without recommends, but
if you were not careful in specifying what backend you wanted, it'd just
install them all unless disabling recommends.
What do you think?
Helmut
