On 04/07/2025 5:56 am, David Wright wrote:
On Thu 03 Jul 2025 at 18:15:42 (+0200), Federico Kircheis wrote:
On 03/07/2025 5:28 pm, Dan Ritter wrote:
Federico Kircheis wrote:
And this also holds for metapackages like lxqt.
It still installs a lot of things, so down to lxqt-core.
It still installs some things I've noticed and to not want, so I need to
inspect which packages are installed, transitive dependencies included..
I hoped it would have been possible to exclude dependencies, for example by
prefixing them with "-"; for example:
No, you don't want to exclude dependencies; doing that will break
packages. That's why they're call dependencies: the package depends
on them being installed.
"apt install lxqt -meteo-qt"
meteo-qt is not a dependency: it's only recommended.
Isn't a recommended package a dependency?
On 03/07/2025 5:51 pm, Greg wrote:
I'm only aware of '--no-install-recommends' as far as apt goes.
Yes, but it has the same issue.
Now many things are missing, and I need to search them out, and
dependencies might change between package releases.
Except that it reverses the logic: --no-install-recommends will
install the packages you ask for, but with minimal extra packages.
When you find that some expected functionality is absent, you
install the package that gives you that functionality, again
Yes, but I do not know which package provides the missing functionality.
For example, with --no-install-recommends, icons are not shown correctly
and trash does not work.
Those are two things I've immediately noticed.
I can track down the relevant packages (it takes time) but how many
other things might I have missed?
And that's just because I did not want some extra functionality I know I
do not want.
Excluding two or three packages is much easier, and the suggested
approach of appending a - works perfectly if the package was not installed.
The amount of time required to install a desktop environment from
scratch with "--no-install-recommends" (including testing that
everything works correctly) is not worth the space/resources I am going
to save.
The more practical approach to install the desktop environment as
recommended, minus some packages I know I do not need, costs only a
fraction of time.
Yes, I might still have some packages I do not need (without me knowing
it), but hopefully the amount of space it takes is negligible for my
use-cases.
with --no-install-recommends to keep your system minimal.
"Now many things are missing":
Well, you can hardly expect the Debian or the DE developers to guess
which functions happen to be the ones that you want.
"and I need to search them out":
Hardly onerous: the package names are likely to be in the Recommends
list of the top-level package you installed.
Might be the case for many command-line tools and most applications,
with the desktop environment my experience differs, even when looking at
lxqt-core.
But if I list all packages, then remove all those that I obviously do
not need, and write a script that install only those, it might "break"
when some packages are updated or new dependencies are added.
With the blacklist approach, I expected it would break only if the
package is now required.
If your "blacklist" system causes breakages, then you can hardly
expect Debian developers to give it any consideration at all.
If the script breaks it's a good thing, and obviously it's up to me to
fix it.
I am not expecting Debian developers to give it any consideration.
With the whitelist I install all the packages, some are not even needed
anymore, and then some functionality might still be missing.
* downloading and uploading unnecessary data not only takes space on
my drive, but also takes more time and unnecessarily consumes my
traffic plan.
* offsite backups take longer, as verifying they integrity and
restore process
Those are reasons why --no-install-recommends was provided in the
first place.
I'm not necessarily talking about the .deb file by
itself, but also docker images, iso files, virtual machines, and so
on, which are built on top of installed deb packages.
That's a separate concern, and in your hands.
Which is why I do not think that big drives are a good argument, not
sure if we disagree here.
* a system with more dependencies has a higher chance to break than a
system with less dependencies when upgrading components
And I'm sure I can find other reason why avoiding some unnecessary
dependencies has positive side-effects
Again, you're confusing the issue by using the wrong terminology.
APT makes sure that dependencies are satisfied. If an extra dependency
is added (rare), it gets installed.¹ If an extra Recommends is added,
you might not even notice the fact when --no-install-recommends is in
force: and if it were to be undesirable, you wouldn't have to do
anything about eliminating it, like blacklisting it.
¹ apt-get users might require dist-upgrade or --with-new-pkgs when
this happens.
Cheers,
David.
