On Mon 2017-06-19 19:24:22 +0100, Andrei Morgan wrote: > ok, I figured it out following the bugreport: when I upgraded, I was > manually required to install monkeysphere. When I manually install, I > generally use the option --no-install-recommends in order to keep > bloat out of my system (which variously suffers anyway).
But if you keep out "recommends" it's generally presumed that you have a sense of what you specifically need the program for, and which use cases you won't need. In the monkeysphere case, it's perfectly reasonable (for example) for a minimalist server to not install agent-transfer, because it does not expect (or even want) users to manipulate secret keys on the host. That is, "monkeysphere subkey-to-ssh-agent" would never be run on that host. So in that installation, having monkeysphere Depends: agent-transfer would itself be the bloat that you say you're trying to avoid :) > Turns out package 'agent-transfer' is recommended rather than a > dependency. I realised this after seeing a similar problem with GPG and > finding bug #845720 where dkg highlights the differences between > Recommends and Depends. > > I believe 'agent-transfer' should be a Depends and therefore this is a > bug in the debian package. I'm closing this bug report because i think the Recommends: and Depends: are correct. for the standard user, they'd expect to have it available, as Andrei did. This is what Recommends: is for, explicitly. Users who want a more minimal ("less bloated") system that don't need all the commonly-used features can use no-install-recommends and manually include the packages necessary to get the features they're looking for. Regards, --dkg
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