On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 11:36:23AM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> A case in point is asciidoc. It's used to generate HTML pages and
> books. To do books it recommends other sofftware that takes about a
> gigabyte on disk. Now the Docbook stuff and the LaTeX stuff are
> necessary for producing books (i.e., printable pdf's) but if you're
> planning on using it to generate web pages it's a real surprise
> when all that stuff gets hauled in.

TeX does far, far more than just "books". These days printing uses mostly
Windowsish patterns, but, especially last millenium, you couldn't get a
non-toy printer without postscript. And in my time at the university, any
paper you read came in .ps or some TeX-related form.

On the other hand, I see the TeX world isn't anywhere as popular as it was
back in the day, so perhaps this Recommends could be downgraded.

Thus, if you believe this should be changed, the command you want is
"reportbug asciidoc", where you can try to persuade the maintainer that
TeX has became a fringe use of asciidoc. Package maintainers (at least when
LETS-NOT-UTTER-THAT-NAMEd is not involved) tend to be reasonable people.
Alternatively, you can override this in Devuan only, but I believe trimmed
Recommends is something better done in the place packaging originates.


Meow!
--
An imaginary friend squared is a real enemy.