On Fri, Jul 04, 2025 at 07:04:32AM +0200, Federico Kircheis wrote: [...]
> Isn't a recommended package a dependency? That... depends :-) In the strict Debian sense, there is "depends": your package won't work if that dependency is not installed. "Recommends": your package might be missing some interesting functionality, but will work, in general. One example: tomas@caliban:~$ apt show xpdf Package: xpdf Version: 3.04+git20220601-1+b2 [...] Depends: libc6 (>= 2.34), libgcc-s1 (>= 3.0), libpaper1, libpoppler126 (>= 22.12.0), libstdc++6 (>= 11), libx11-6, libxm4 (>= 2.3.4), libxt6 Recommends: poppler-utils, poppler-data, gsfonts-x11, cups-bsd, sensible-utils If libc6 isn't there, the xpdf binary won't even start. If it has a version less than 2.34, it might start, but might do funny things. OTOH, if you don't have poppler-utils, xpdf will work fine, but you might miss some nice things to play with PDFs. (Life, being what it is, gives us a grey area between "doesn't work at all" and "reduced functionality" -- where'd be the fun otherwise?) FWIW, I like a minimal system, so I have in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/95no-recommends APT::Install-Recommends no; This puts the burden on me to look at the Recommends section in packages I install and decide on a case-by-case basis. Cheers -- t
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
