[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#963093: samtools: recommended dependencies are unnecessary

[Alan Hoyle]

Package: samtools
Version: 1.10-4
Severity: minor

Dear Maintainer,


Samtools includes recommended installation of python and cwltool.

python is completely unnecessary now.

cwltool should be a "suggests" at most for samtools, though I would make 
samtools a "recommends" for cwltool, as many workflows that use cwltool
do use samtools.  

I discovered this because I was creating Docker images for processing 
sequencing data and I noticed that python and cwltool were being
installed unless I included --no-install-recommends on the apt-get
command line.  

The disadvantage to leaving this is that some Debian images will be
larger even when they don't need cwltool or python.  

I have been emailing with Andreas Tille outside of this bug report and I
think he has addressed this issue in the following two git commits:

https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/samtools/-/commit/e8c62ffa10f390937a225fb4188fa9c31510379a

https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/samtools/-/commit/81ac71e9ddacb88279c35a913c81ba8f5118720a

Thanks,

Alan

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.3
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.19.76-linuxkit (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_RANDSTRUCT
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: unable to detect

Versions of packages samtools depends on:
ii  libc6        2.28-10
ii  libhts2      1.9-11
ii  libncurses6  6.1+20181013-2+deb10u2
ii  libtinfo6    6.1+20181013-2+deb10u2
ii  zlib1g       1:1.2.11.dfsg-1

Versions of packages samtools recommends:
pn  cwltool  <none>
pn  python   <none>

samtools suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information