apt with --install-recommends support

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 07:18:44AM -0500, Brandon Holtsclaw wrote:
> > We would like to make "install-recommends" the default soon. But
> > before that we need to review the current recommends to see if all are
> > justified or if some should rather be "Suggests" (which will not be
> > installed by default). The current version of apt contains a
> > "--fix-policy" option that will check what packages are "recommended"
> > by other installed packages but not installed. I attached the output
> 
> Do we realy want to make this transition mid-stride in edgy ? 

Mid-stride?  We planned this feature for Edgy from the start.

Aptitude has been honoring Recommends for some time now, so its users have
hopefully rooted out most of the inappropriate ones, but we'll obviously
make a decision based on what we see in Edgy.

> Also not knowing much about this the planning that went behind this decision 
> would this not put a crimp in auto syncing from debian at the begining of 
> release cycles unless debian adopted this method upstream also AND agreed to 
> {all,most} our reomends audit sugestions ? or would this just add many more 
> hundreds ( thousands ? ) of merges to an already long list ?

We're not changing the definition of Recommends; Debian policy already
defines them the way that we want.  It's just that the lack of support in
the tools has allowed some bugs to go unnoticed.

In places where our dependency preferences differ from Debian's (as they
already do in many places), yes, we'll need to merge.

-- 
 - mdz