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Plebian-Linux / quartz64-images

GitHub Actions Repository for automatically generated images for the Quartz64 family of single board computers
https://plebian.org
GNU General Public License v3.0
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One should install recommends and only in exceptional cases one should choose not to #3

Closed diederikdehaas closed 1 year ago

diederikdehaas commented 1 year ago

I just saw the following in debos-recipes/debian-quartz64.yaml:

  - action: apt
    description: Install base packages
    recommends: false
    packages:
      - <long package list>

And I doubt that recommends: false is what you would/should want.

Recommends in Debian are like soft dependencies: technically they are not required for the package which recommends them to function at all, but in ~ 99% of cases you really want them. Therefor they are installed by default.

You can choose/determine that in specific cases you do not want/need them and then you would install that particular package without recommends. But especially in scripts/recipes like this, you should clearly document that (in code or (separate) commit message).

But in the above code snippet, it gets done for all packages, without an explanation as to why. I think one should NOT do that.

diederikdehaas commented 1 year ago

I choose not to submit a MR which simply changes false into true (or delete that line as I assume true is the default) as this will probably result in a much bigger image/installed size.
Because not only will the direct Recommends be installed, but also Depends and Recommends of Recommends ... turtles all the way down.

As I don't know what you want (exactly), I figured it would be best to let the actual change (if any) up to you.

CounterPillow commented 1 year ago

I've already conceded that the image size will probably be set to 2GB instead of 1GB, so we've got plenty of space for packages.

I'm mostly concerned about apt pulling in anything dumb like gnome icons or an X11 server, which is a hard no.

diederikdehaas commented 1 year ago

I'm mostly concerned about apt pulling in anything dumb like gnome icons or an X11 server, which is a hard no.

And that is a real possibility, hence me not submitting a PR. It often takes a bit of experimenting and researching to figure out how to get what you want and not get what you don't want.

I can probably assist in that if you want :-)