How shall I report a bug in the .deb packaging itself?

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi Alberto,

seemingly you can't provide new arguments, so you should expect to get the  
same replies and perhaps some subscribers consider it as trolling or  
spamming, so that they don't read mails of this thread anymore.

On Sun, 27 Dec 2015 15:22:02 +0100, Alberto Salvia Novella wrote:
> David Kalnischkies:
>  > Your complain was after all that apt declares some packages you
>  > consider unused as used...
>
> The problem seems to be that the package manager does not make its basic
> functionality, which is to make clear for users which packages they wish
> to remove.

A package manager's functionality is to remove packages, but not to know  
(and to make clear) what the user wishes to remove.
Apt has got no mind reading abilities, but apt provides options, such as  
"--no-install-recommends" and a configuration file, assumed it's not only  
temporarily wanted. Apt based GUIs such as Synaptic provide a  
configuration either, but I don't know if they are related to this issue.

> http://tinyurl.com/q7rkpcg

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy#Intentional_fallacies

Have you read it and compared with what you're doing? Consider also to read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossposting

and compare it with what you're doing.

Regarding Ubuntu flavors I'm subscribed to this list and to
- Ubuntu users
- Xubuntu users
- Ubunbtu Studio users
- Ubuntu Studio devel
at least since month, to some lists since years and I was subscribed to at  
least
- Kubuntu user
- Debian user
too.

What you consider to be an issue, seems to be not an issue for others, I  
can't remember any thread about this subject. Changing the behavior of apt  
most likely would cause confusion and break the work-flow of many users,  
without providing a benefit.

A suggestion already was made, it might be possible to provide a very  
limited undo feature based on the log file, aka history. I wouldn't expect  
that somebody will program this, but you could write a script yourself, so  
no special programming abilities are needed.

Upstream and some other distros usually do not separate recommended and  
suggested dependencies, it's a Debian policy.

"Recommends

This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.

The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together  
with this one in all but unusual installations.

Suggests

This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with one or  
more others. Using this field tells the packaging system and the user that  
the listed packages are related to this one and can perhaps enhance its  
usefulness, but that installing this one without them is perfectly  
reasonable." -  
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html

This policy has got advantages and drawbacks. One of the drawbacks is what  
you're experiencing as an issue, IOW it doesn't perfectly fits to  
everybody's needs. My favorite package management isn't apt. I prefer  
pacman over apt. However, you likely would prefer apt over pacman, but  
there might be another package management that fit better to your needs,  
than apt does.

IMO a distro should stay with it's policy and not change it to satisfy a  
minority of users of this distro. I don't expect Ubuntu/Debian to adopt  
the way pacman works, since it's made to fit to a completely different  
policy, for a completely different distro, with a completely different  
target group. For my needs I use another distro, to help Linux musicians I  
additionally use Ubuntu flavors. IMO you unlikely will find a more  
user-friendly distro than Ubuntu, this is at least the distro the so  
called averaged user (mentioned by you) prefers over other distros. It's  
very risky to change basics of a distro, especially if just a minority of  
users would benefit from such changes, that at the same time likely would  
confuse a majority of users.

Regards,
Ralf