On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 07:43:26PM -0500, T.J. Duchene wrote:
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Franco Lanza [mailto:nextime@nexlab.it]
> > Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2015 5:36 PM
> > To: dng@???
> > Subject: [Dng] What do you guys think about "Suggest" and "Recommends"
> > dependency?
> >
> > Personally on debian i was using from date
> >
> > APT:Install-Recommends "0";
> > APT:Install-Suggests "0";
> >
> > in all my install apt.conf.
> >
> > I don't like apt downloading and installing things that are not required
> but
> > just recommended or suggested, expecially in server or embedded envs, but
> > also on my desktop.
> >
> > What do you think if we make this the default in devuan?
>
>
> [T.J. ] Personally, I love the idea. However, in certain instances, like
> "-dev" packages or "build environments", where the recommended should really
> be followed. I'd follow it wherever Perl or Python is involved as well,
> even if you aren't working on code, just to make sure everything works
> smoothly.

No, this is fundamentally incorrect.

Building should always be deterministic. This means never ever using
Suggests or Recommends. sbuild, for example, always sets
APT::Install-Recommends=false. In addition, it will also drop
conditional dependencies so that only the first will be used, again
for determinism.

Less strict behaviour is fine when installing packages for a developer
to use on their development machine, but for automated/final builds
for deployment elsewhere, such as Debian package building, it's
essential that the necessary packages are completely and
unambiguously specified with plain Depends.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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