Comment # 7 on bug 1196547 from Alois Wohlschlager

What about enabling recommends, but shipping targeted locks to prevent
installation of the worst offenders by default? That's what I currently do on
my MicroOS system, since no-recommends is too barebones, and with my approach I
get the bloat down quite a bit (actually the current root snapshot for some
reason uses *less* disk space than the one of a completely vanilla reference
installation in a VM).