Hi, my impression is that too many packages use Recommends that should really be Suggests. As a random example: installing dracut as a initramfs provider will pull in exim4... (dracut-core Recommends: mdadm which Recommends: default-mta | mail-transport-agent). This seems really not ideal.
As a result many people seem to disable installing recommended packages by default. I believe we should be much more agressive in downgrading dependencies to Suggests. For example, very few packages should Depend/Recommend a MTA: if you just send notifications (like mdadm), you would need a properly configured MTA anyway or they just end up in a file nobody will ever look at (I don't see local mail to root as very useful). I suggest that only very few packages should Recommend a MTA: packages that mainly deal with mail on servers in some way or another (for user-facing applications, speaking SMTP to a remote SMTP server is common enough that these shouldn't Recommend a MTA usually either). Ansgar
