[pkg-cryptsetup-devel] Bug#548900: Bug#492560: Bug#548900: udev update killed my LVM2 boot (sed: not found)

[Sheridan Hutchinson]

2009/9/30 maximilian attems <max at stro.at>:
> your box is simply broken if it does not foollow the debian reference,
> which explicitly says that recommends have to be installed.
> and yes you have negletected the big warnings.
> tweaking Debian boxes is fine as long as you understand what you change
> and can handle the consequences.

Hello Max,

Thank you for your perspective.  It's interesting when install
recommends became default from what I read at the time it seemed
perfectly acceptable to continue running without recommends, and I
understand that many people do.  Over time it appears that has become
less so the case, but I have never seen a big warning and cannot find
in the Debian documents where it says that package functionality
cannot be guaranteed without 'recommends' being enabled.

I am very keen to keep my machines as close to stock and reference as
possible so I'm going to considering changing apt back to the default
install recommends this weekend.  My boxes are highly untuned/tweaked
and where possible I run with default configuration files and let the
packages themselves look after everything.  If I do configure anything
my preference is always to use --reconfigure or the package/app using
it's own interface.  To think I'm meddling with my boxes intricacy's
just isn't the case.

Overall though, as far as machines that follow the reference Debian
install are concerned, I cannot see the distinction now between a hard
dependency, and a recommends dependency.  Maybe in future there will
just be 'dependencies' and 'suggests'; the recommends category is
superfluous for a Debian reference install.

-- 
Regards,
Sheridan Hutchinson
sheridan at shezza.org