Universe Recommends for packages in main

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday 02 July 2008 09:46, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 11:16:09PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Yes, this means that a number of packages will need to be adjusted where
> > we feel that Recommends are inappropriate and should be Suggests
> > instead. I don't actually think that this will be all that many, though;
> > it's certainly a far smaller delta than many others that we continue to
> > maintain.
>
> I've done some testing with my germinate modifications. The following
> additional binary packages would require promotion to main when
> Recommends are followed (note that I've only checked i386, but I don't
> expect the differences would be substantial):
>
>   libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl
>   libcrypt-openssl-rsa-perl
>   libmail-dkim-perl
>   libnet-dns-perl
>   libnet-ip-perl

These all got promoted today (thanks doko and pitti for the MIR processing).  
I had anticipated these based on the amavisd-new recommends, so it looks like 
it's working correctly.

> Some of these are trivial, some are bugs, and some are even in main
> already for one reason or another. I think very few packaging changes
> will be needed to keep packages out of main as a result of this.
>
> At present the number of packages pulled into (e.g.) the desktop CDs as
> a result of following Recommends is rather more substantial. However, I
> think this is mostly because language-pack-*-base recommends
> language-support-*, and once that's fixed most of this should go away.
> The list follows for completeness, but don't panic about it just yet.

Is there an easy way to determine which package is to blame for pulling these 
in?  I can see this being very helpful for getting things sorted out.  

As an example, if exim4 is getting pulled onto the Desktop CD, I'm guessing 
it'll likely get pulled onto the Sever CD too and we'll want to want to do 
some additional exim4|mail-transport-agent / postfix|mail-tranport-agent 
changes.  It'd be handy to have a easy way to get the work list.

Scott K