[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#912725: virtinst: Please demote virtinst recommends on virt-viewer to suggests

[Karl Goetz]

Package: virtinst
Version: 1:1.4.0-5
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I would like to request the dependency currently held by virtinst on
virt-viewer be downgraded to suggests instead of recommends.

https://salsa.debian.org/libvirt-team/virt-manager/blob/debian/sid/debian/control#L59

Virtinst is " a set of commandline tools to create virtual machines
using libvirt" yet due to its virt-viewer dependency downloads 500mb of
otherwise unecesary packages.

Note in the examples below I already have qemu installed so it didn't
affect the package tree.

When installed with no parameters:
0 upgraded, 258 newly installed, 0 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 137 MB of archives.
After this operation, 516 MB of additional disk space will be used.


When installed with no-install-recommends:
0 upgraded, 27 newly installed, 0 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 5,691 kB of archives.
After this operation, 16.8 MB of additional disk space will be used.


thanks,
Karl.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.5
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-7-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages virtinst depends on:
ii  gir1.2-libosinfo-1.0  1.0.0-2
ii  python                2.7.13-2
ii  python-gi             3.22.0-2
ii  python-ipaddr         2.1.11-2
ii  python-libvirt        3.0.0-2
ii  python-libxml2        2.9.4+dfsg1-2.2+deb9u2
ii  python-requests       2.12.4-1
ii  python2.7             2.7.13-2+deb9u3

Versions of packages virtinst recommends:
ii  qemu-utils   1:2.8+dfsg-6+deb9u4
pn  virt-viewer  <none>

virtinst suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information