On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 11:11:24AM +0100, Tomasz Kundera wrote:
> > * Recommends: "The Recommends field should list packages that would be
> > found
> > together with this one in all but unusual installations"
> >
>
> The question is what should be the default behaviour. At least in the
> minimal installation the default should be "No", don't install Recommends.
> It was a default Debian policy not so long ago. It was a good policy. Now
> the default Recommends policy in Debian ("Yes") is very often misused to
> install really unneeded stuff.
>

Well, unfortunately there is currently no clear-cut about
Recommends. In most of the cases a package will work fine 99.99% of
the times even if you don't have the Recommends installed (as in the
case of the gdbserver recommended by gdb), in some of the cases a
Recommend is simply unnecessary (like exim4 recommended by mutt) but
in many other cases Recommends include "standard" package
associations, which would make your package loose some
important/typical functionalities if not installed (like in the case
of ghostscript recommended by gimp)...

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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