Daniel Reurich <daniel@???> writes:
> Why are we dragging up a thread from over a year ago??
>
> I strongly disagree, installing "Recommends" are IMHO reasonable for the
> common case, and that should stay the default except where the user
> wants to maintain a really minimal system,

The usually 'recommended' software is the zeroconf/ 'LAN party' networking daemon
(avahi) which is almost always useless.

More generally spoken, neither Recommends: nor Suggests: declarations
should exist to begin with: They both represent a perfectly arbitrary
opinion of the package maintainer and it's not easily possible to
determine what they'll end up installing or for which reasons.

People who are convinced that their opinions about 'sensible software
collections' are generally valuable should create meta-packages other
people who want to use them can then install.