On Wed, May 24, Matěj Cepl wrote:
See https://bugzilla.suse.com/1211446 … it seems to me that this attitude, that everybody switch off Recommends, because they bring too much garbage, so it is all right that packages bring too much garbage, is rather evil.
Any comments on it?
The old problem discussed already hundreds of times. In the past everybody added everything "usefull" as hard requires, so if a package could work together with mariadb or postgresql as database backend, you had to install both, even if you can only use one and you wanted to use your remote database instance... Now with Requires, Recommends and Suggests it's a little bit better, but yes, there is still far too much "crap" in it. Quite some people only changed their Requires to Recommends, so if you install package X, it will still pull in mariadb, postgresql, ... and other databases at the same time. That's why many people disable recommends... And of course there is MicroOS and containers, where we really only want the bare minimal and nothing "may be usefull", thus we disabled recommends by default. Requires: the package will not work in any case without this dependency Recommends: the package will work without this dependency installed, but this could mean, that not all features are useable. This should be a usefull, minimal set of dependencies, which allows the user to use common functionality of the package without the need to install additional packages. Suggests: packages which could be usefull As example: git-core hard requires less. If less is hardcoded in git-core, this Requires is correct. If it is only optional, this should be a Recommends, since there are other pagers the user maybe preferes. If there is a UI for git, it sould be "suggests" and not "recommends", as most people will use the CLI and not a UI version. For this bug: could it be that there is a package already installed, which "Recommends" openssh-server? I saw that several times in the past, that installing a package did trigger dependencies of already installed packages, too. But in the end, only a solver testcase and our zypper developers can tell you more. Thorsten
Best,
Matěj -- https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/, @mcepl@floss.social GPG Finger: 3C76 A027 CA45 AD70 98B5 BC1D 7920 5802 880B C9D8
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