Why installing openjdk-7-jdk on Ubuntu Trusty installs systemd as well?

[Colin Law]

On 3 January 2017 at 21:16, sktsee <sktseer at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> A 14.04 desktop system will already have systemd-shim installed, whereas
> on a minimal 14.04 host system it won't have any systemd related packages
> installed. When installing openjdk-7-jdk with the default option of
> including packages with the :Recommends dependency, it pulled something
> that depended on the systemd-services package. It you take a look at the
> package information for systemd-services, you'll notice that it has this
> dependency at the end:
>
> ,systemd | systemd-shim (>= 3)
>
> So either the package systemd or systemd-shim will satisfy the dependency
> for systemd-services. I believe that since systemd is listed first, the
> resolver chooses it over systemd-shim when installing. That's my theory
> anyway.

That sounds entirely plausible.  So possibly the solution for the OP
is to install systemd-shim first, then the jdk.  Unless
--no-install-recommends solves the problem in the first place.

Colin