Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> writes: > If there is a best set of Recommends for inexperienced users, and a > best set of Recommends for experienced users who value minimality, then > we should err in the direction of supporting the inexperienced users, > precisely because those are the people least likely to be able to use > package managers to get a particular feature that they want.
Yes, this. Experienced users can also turn off installation of Recommends, so I think the focus should be on making things work "as expected" for people who don't want to understand the details. There's also a huge difference, given this criteria, betweeen wasted disk space and running daemons. I think the latter is worth trying to track down; the former seems largely futile to me. All of the disk space gains you might conceivably get from, say, removing the recommeds on libmail-sendmail-perl from po-debconf will be dwarfed by minor changes to the documentation of some other package on your system, or some new feature in some standard library. > If some "wasted" disk space on typical systems is the price we pay for a > feature working on the first attempt, rather than an inexperienced user > giving up before they can get that feature to work, or simply not > knowing that the feature is even possible, then that seems a worthwhile > price to pay. Amen. >>> libgnomeui-0: xscreensaver >>> * BAD: Gnome users won't run xscreensaver >> What? The hell they won't. > This one *is* obsolete though - not xscreensaver, but libgnomeui-0. > libgnome and libgnomeui were deprecated sometime during the GNOME 2 era, > and for stretch the GNOME team has finally managed to exclude them from > a default desktop installation (task-gnome-desktop), but unfortunately > there are still more than 50 packages using them. The GNOME team would > be delighted to see that number go down. The libgnome* libraries help > you to integrate with a desktop from around 10 years ago that we no > longer ship, and are not part of modern GNOME; their high-level > functionality has mostly been superseded by code in GLib and GTK+. Ah, good call. So this one really should be a bug report. https://bugs.debian.org/864310 -- please feel free to weigh in and correct me if I got any of the details wrong. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>