Sorry, reply button turned into a personal response to the poster, instead heading towards the list. Am 26.05.23 um 09:51 schrieb Manfred Schwarb:

Am 25.05.23 um 10:52 schrieb Thorsten Kukuk:

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On Wed, May 24, Matěj Cepl wrote:

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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

While there is "zypper install --recommends", there is no such thing for suggests. If the user can't install suggested packages by a single command, the dependency tag "Suggests:" remains useless. If "Suggests:" would be functional, one could think of migrating some entries from "Recommends:" to "Suggests:". "Suggests:" should really be similar to "Recommends:", just turned off by default, and with corresponding tooling support.

Cheers, Manfred