Automatic installation of recommended packages

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 09:27:11AM +0100, Luis de Bethencourt wrote:
> Sorry I couldn't join the discusion about it at UDS, but... what's the
> purpose of this change?

The "Recommends" relationship is defined as "packages that would be found
together with this one in all but unusual installations".  This is generally
taken to mean that it would be appropriate to install them by default, but
allow them to be removed (aptitude and some other high-level package
managers have had this behaviour for ages).  Currently, they're ignored by
default, so there's no way to provide those semantics.  Implementing
Recommends fully will fix that.

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html

-- 
 - mdz