On Mon, 01 Aug 2016, Rainer Weikusat wrote:

> 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.

I wholeheartedly agree with Reiner's interpretation and also with the
solution proposed, nevertheless we did have already this conversation
and the decision has been taken even before that, by declaring what
Devuan needs to be for its 1.0: it needs to be a Debian without
systemd, with no other surprises attached.

Everyone supporting and donating to Devuan is doing that because they
know we are doing what we declared to be doing and with great
attention to details. We are not going to change that, because it
would betray all promises and expectations on which this project is
building upon.

What is feasible to do and comes out of this thread is to nurture the
documentation about this setting and perhaps aim to add an option in
Ascii about deactivating recommends: and suggests: . OTOH, inside
derivatives like Devuan Minimal Live may want to implement this by
default, but then this would mostly be Katolaz decision.

ciao