On 2019-07-13 06:39, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
...some developers wrongly thought that recommends was same as
suggests and therefore used depends far more than really needed.
This. Installing with Recommends used to pull in a whole slew of things
that should have been Suggests, so users got into the habit of
installing without.
> The bug got fixed, and slowly developers learned to make proper use of
> recommends as it was always intended.
Most developers anyway.
I remember when Debian systems started installing Recommends /by
default/ - and there was an outcry - but was this a fixed bug in apt-get
itself? Wasn't Debian Policy also amended a bit at that point to make
the purpose of Recommends clearer? Or had it always been that way...
Anyway, even if your system default is to install Recommends, apt-get
(and apt too?) always gets user approval before installing anything
beyond the package asked for. If the list looks too long (s)he can
always hit (N) and try again with
'apt-get install --no-install-recommends <package>'
--
John
