Status of weak dependencies support in Fedora 21+

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sat, 2014-11-15 at 14:51 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> It's not "hackish", it's "configurable". Letting the user decide
> whether 
> they want to have weak dependencies installed or not is part of the
> whole 
> point of having them.

I agree. --no-recommends is a very basic feature of package managers in
other distros that users will expect to be present in dnf.

At the same time, we should be very careful with recommends so that
they're used only for rare cases where the user really almost always
wants the recommended package, and thus will usually not want to use
--no-recommends. Debian packages, for example, overuse recommends
leading to odd situations where both installing and not installing
recommended packages leads to lousy results. E.g. for gnome-chess in
Debian, if you install with recommends (the default in Debian and
Ubuntu) you will pull in odd chess engines and Xboard, a chess GUI from
the 1990s, but if you install without recommends (the default in Mint,
as a reaction to bad Recommends) you get no chess engine at all and thus
no computer player (and thus upstream bug reports). A GUI program
Recommending (or requiring, even indirectly) another GUI program should
not be acceptable in Fedora.
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