On 2024-05-11 06:06, Atri Bhattacharya wrote:
Darryl Gregorash wrote:
I had a suspicion you would sooner or later be saying this. The most likely reason you have all these development packages installed is because they were recommended by something else. They got installed because your zypper configuration allows installation of recommended packages. To stop this, (as root) load /etc/zypp/zypp.conf into your favourite editor, and find "solver.onlyRequires". Most likely it is set to "false". Change that to "true" (without the quotes) and save the file.
As a packager for a few openSUSE packages, I die a little inside whenever I see anyone recommend this, frankly reckless (I do not mean it with malice towards anyone, but it just is), configuration to not-so-experienced users.
Long-ish rant follows — please humour me — but TL;DR: You should only set no-recommends as the default zypp behaviour **if and only if** you fully understand what its implications are and what `Requires`, `Recommends`, `Supplements`, and especially `Supplements: (pkgA and pkgB)` in an RPM specfile convey. You are guaranteed to miss out on important features that the packager — who works on the package and really understands what additional features its 'Recommends' provides — intends the default user to benefit from.
Please consider the following examples (from Tumbleweed, but they apply to ANY distro, not even limited to openSUSE):
Thanks for your comments; they are very informative, and welcome. I do have only one observation: If a package adds important features that users will find beneficial, or even nearly essential, to supplement the features they want on their systems, then perhaps the package should be a "require", not a "recommend". Both the examples you give seem, in my mind, to fall in that category.