Simon Lees composed on 2023-05-28 04:23 (UTC+0930):

Matěj Cepl wrote:

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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.

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Any comments on it?

The general response is we know there are a number of places where switching off recommends will break things, particularly in the desktop patterns. If someone finds an issue we will try our best to fix it, but sometimes peoples opinions on what is required for a functioning system differ in which cases we usually use maintainer discretion.

Nominal "breakage" is a most TW dup-days occurrence here: # grep onlyR /etc/zypp/zypp.conf solver.onlyRequires = true # zypper ll | grep -E 'lang|local|font|deve' | sort 1 | *-lang | package | (any) | 10 | cantarell-font* | package | (any) | 14 | glibc-deve? | package | (any) | 15 | glibc-local? | package | (any) | 16 | google*fonts | package | (any) | 20 | kde-oxygen-font* | package | (any) | 26 | noto*fonts | package | (any) | 29 | raleway-font* | package | (any) | A big annoyance here is having to respond with a different numbered selection corresponding to "break" for various locked-out packages when running zypper dup. After more than a decade of this I feel safe in saying not having any particular font installed never "breaks" any more than an intrusive maintainer's ego. Normal people don't *need* more than a pittance of fonts packages. They shouldn't have to work to avoid wasting time and bandwidth on fonts they don't need or want, or to enjoy their favorite fonts on their own devices. -- Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion, based on faith, not based on science. Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata

On 5/28/23 08:01, Eric Schirra wrote:

Am 27. Mai 2023 20:53:16 MESZ schrieb Simon Lees :

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On 5/25/23 06:30, Matěj Cepl wrote:

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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 general response is we know there are a number of places where switching off recommends will break things, particularly in the desktop patterns. If someone finds an issue we will try our best to fix it, but sometimes peoples opinions on what is required for a functioning system differ in which cases we usually use maintainer discretion.

I find this discussion ludicrous. People are fighting over a few megabytes. At the same time, however, the focus is on Alp/MicroOS/flatpack, where several gigabytes are installed twice and three times and thus unnecessarily.

Secondly, I think a programme should be able to do everything it can right from the start after installation. How is a user supposed to find out which additional package is needed?

Well, it depends on the user. If a user does not care, or does not know packages enough, then going with recommends is the best way. However, going without recommended does not only save disk space. I'm not trying to install minimal systems just because I started using SUSE Linux 4.3 on a 400MB hard drive alongside Windows 27 years ago :-) The less software you have the smaller the updates are and the smaller the attack surface is. On SUSE Linux 4.3 I knew for each and every package what they did. Unfortunately it's not the case any more, but still I think keeping a system minimal is the best approach and one can learn a lot while cleaning a system. As you can see from my comment, I do start installation with Recommends, so I have a working system, and go to minimal from that state. For the syslog-ng package, which I maintain,  I do not use Recommends at all. The syslog-ng package itself has all core functionality, but nothing more. I leave it up to the user to install any additional syslog-ng sub-packages. Even if those sub-packages are just a few kilobytes in most cases, they can pull in huge dependencies, like Java, etc. If someone configures syslog-ng by hand and tries to use an uninstalled module, the error message is quite helpful in most cases. Peter

Am 28. Mai 2023 09:52:42 MESZ schrieb Jan Engelhardt :

On Sunday 2023-05-28 08:01, Eric Schirra wrote:

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On 5/25/23 06:30, Matěj Cepl wrote:

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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.

The general response is we know there are a number of places where switching off recommends will break things, particularly in the desktop patterns.

E.g. evince-plugin-pdfdocument. But it's fine to be recommended rather than required. wpg and pcx support in msword are also optional, because when was the last time you exercised wpg/pcx functionality? (It depends on the user!)

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I think a programme should be able to do everything it can right from the start after installation. How is a user supposed to find out which additional package is needed?

That is the point; if you are such a user, you choose "recommended"/"typical", not --no-recommends/"custom". The concept is at least as old

That's exactly how I handle it in packages. If there are things that are probably (this is just my opinion) rarely needed, I set them to recommend in the package. But I don't just drop them in. But that's exactly what has been asked for in this thread, isn't it? And I think absolutely nothing of that.