On Sun, 22 May 2016 18:41:32 +0200, Didier Kryn wrote:
> Le 22/05/2016 18:13, Irrwahn a écrit :
[...]
>> I am certain almost nobody would object to that proposal.
>> But it would need a notable number of people to step up
>> and act as package maintainers to accomplish the task,
>> namely to cut down to a tolerable size that giant maze of
>> dependencies created by generations of Debian maintainers.
>>
>

>      Sure there are the "recommends" and the decision of the maintainer 
> when creating the *-task package, 

I was not concerned about the *Recommends* (I have configured
APT::Install-Recommends "0"; anyway), but about the *Depends*.
In the example you snipped lxde actually *Depends* on galculator
etc.! Otherwise I would not even have objected.

> but I have the impression the problem
> is also upstream. The authors cherry-pick libraries providing features
> they need. I noticed long ago some application (don't remember which)
> which has no relation with the www but depends on some Apache library.

True. Alas, there is only so much a package maintainer can do
about a messy upstream.

Regards
Urban