Comment # 13 on bug 1196547 from Ludwig Nussel

(In reply to Alois Wohlschlager from comment #12)
> Recommends are, in my book, supposed to be things which are in fact *not* strictly mandatory, but generally useful to have.

That's the theory. In practice we ended up with a mess and without soft locks.
Now those recommends are just a pita, haunting you if you don't also lock
packages :-) They might be ok actually for something like, say FreeCAD, ie some
extra app that you will for sure install manually and interactively. So the UI
can show you specifically for that app what it recommends. For the thousands of
OS components the recommends just lead to not seeing the forest for all the
trees though. We'd be better off trying harder to avoid them.

> [...] Some concrete examples
> TW/MicroOS experience:
> * enhanced_base -> plymouth: This is a Recommends, so it's not installed on
> MicroOS today. The system works without a boot splash, but it looks nicer
> with one.

Plymouth needs to be made a requirement for graphical desktops unfortunately.
If someone desperately doesn't want it installed, the pattern dragging plymouth
in would have to be uninstalled.

> (Same with the language magic this issue is about, but I don't
> understand how it works exactly. 

The locale is some kind of virtual provides of the system and packages
containing localization files supplement that. Hardware supplements work in a
similar way.

> * microos_desktop_common -> hplip-hpijs, OpenPrintingPPDs: This is in fact a
> Requires today. A desktop system can work without printing if so desired,
> but a significant part of the userbase appreciates their printer working.

That should neither be required nor recommended. If one plugs a USB printer,
hardware supplements are supposed to pull in required packages. I wouldn't be
surprised if that's broken (again) on openSUSE though. Also any assumptions
about whether or not users with local printers constitute a significant part of
the user base are based on pure guessing related to personal bias :-)

> As a concrete example again, the x11 -> x11_enhanced -> web_browser
> Recommends chain does make sense on traditional systems. On MicroOS not so
> much, since you just install the browser using Flatpak.

Also in that case the recommends should be removed IMO. Default applications
can be pulled in by a specific pattern that is added explicitly by YaST when
selecting a desktop via role. No need to express this via dependencies. But
then maybe we should also stop treating the traditional desktop install as the
Linux desktop demo show we have currently. We can do it like in MicroOS. Basic
desktop only, ie fast install. Then have eg opensuse-welcome suggest a bunch of
common apps with a nice UI on first boot.