On 06/11/2024 19:20, Bill Allombert wrote: > Le Tue, Nov 05, 2024 at 05:35:59PM -0600, Aaron Rainbolt a écrit : >> Hello, and thanks for your time. >> >> I've been a Debian user and contributor for a while, and have noticed a >> rather frustrating issue that I'm interested in potentially >> contributing code to fix. The issue is what I call "Recommended bloat", >> which in short is what happens when you install a package with all of >> its recommended packages, and end up with a whole lot of stuff installed >> that you don't want and that the package you actually wanted probably >> didn't even need. > > A proposal I made was an option for apt to handle Recommends non > recursively. > That is if A Recommends B and B Recommends C, > apt-get install A --no-transitive-recommends > would install B but not C.
This, please! As a user, when I choose to install a package, I am likely to have a reasonable idea of what that package's recommendations do and whether I need them. However, for transitive recommendations, it is unlikely that I will know whether I need those packages. If they in turn have lots of further dependencies then I will probably not install them and take the risk of unwanted breakage to my system. If the top level package that I originally did want needs those transitive recommendations it should recommend them itself, rather than relying on recommendations further down the dependency chain. It would also be helpful if more package descriptions could explain why recommended and suggested packages are needed or helpful and what functionality they provide that would be lost if they were not installed. (Many already do this.) Thanks, Roger PS. I use aptitude, so I can interactively browse through the lists of recommendations, but it's still hard work and it can be a long list of very obscure packages. Do any of the GUI package managers show a graphical dependency tree? That might be really helpful to understand the package relationships and visualise the consequences of various actions. PPS. And the moon on a stick too, please!
