My idea about this is that there should be a switch in YaST "Automatically install packages that are suggested by other packages". This allows the users that just want to have a useful system to get all these packages without looking up hundreds of thousands of things and it allows the users that want to save every byte that is not really required on their disk to turn all suggests globally off. I
Interesting option indeed. I'm not sure if I'd like to have that as the only possible way to handle the option, but looks like a good start. Perhaps we could base on that to create some kind of user interface to enable/disable additional suggested/recommended packages on-the-fly.
recommend to have this switch turned on by default because most users are most likely served best if they have too much software installed than when something is missing.
I'm not completely sure about this though. Depending on the network of packages, installing a package could bring the whole repository with it, and package management is not so useful anymore. There's also the issue of space and bandwidth constraints. Depending on your vendor's repository size, it may become impossible to install everything, and even if you do install everything, it might mean getting many uninteresting upgrades constantly.
Another switch might be useful that selects whether YaST should display a dependency resolver question when the issue is only caused by honouring the suggests feature.
Yep.. that's part of the "expected behavior" issue. Notice that installing a suggested package is not an atomic operation. You must satisfy the dependencies of the suggested package as well, and the suggested package and its requirements may have other suggestions. Doing those operations without user knowledge is not an option, in my opinion. It could bring a hundred packages to install a single package with a single suggestion. -- Gustavo Niemeyer http://niemeyer.net