Software updater snuck in a package that is unwanted

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:33:45 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
>However, as I also mentioned, it doesn't matter in practice since the
>way these metapackages are maintained (they're autogenerated from a set
>of files that declare what packages go in various categories) means
>that the natural way to switch unattended-upgrades from Depends to
>Recommends would apply the change to both ubuntu-mate-core and
>ubuntu-mate-desktop at once without a developer needing to take any
>special action.

Regarding optional dependencies "recommends" has got it's advantages and
disadvantages over "suggests". Making it a recommended package unlikely
would help Bret a lot, if at all. After removing it, he easily could
reinstall it by accident, at least when making a release upgrade, it
would reappear. I'm in favour of making it a recommended dependency,
instead of keeping it as a hard dependency or making it a suggested
dependency, however, this much likely won't help Bret. Bret either
should trust Ubuntu-Mate defaults without doubts and/or he needs to
become much more familiar with customizing Ubuntu-Mate and computer
software at large.