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

[Matt Taggart]

Hi,

This bug was opened 5 years ago, but it is still the case as of version 
1:4.1.0-3 that virtinst Recommends virt-viewer and pulls in tons of 
packages that are unneeded in many cases. On my currently freshly 
installed bookworm system (with libvirt already installed):

0 upgraded, 350 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 243 MB of archives.
After this operation, 854 MB of additional disk space will be used.

vs

0 upgraded, 45 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 12.4 MB of archives.
After this operation, 52.6 MB of additional disk space will be used.

It's definitely a common use case to use virtinst without virt-viewer 
and it would be nice if this was fixed.

Interestingly, the virt-manager package only Suggests virt-viewer but, 
if anything, I would think the dependency would be stronger there? So 
maybe Recommends or even Depends? But I guess it's possible to use 
virt-manager to manage VMs without ever needing to launch virt-viewer, 
so maybe Suggests is correct there as well.

For those running into this, the work around is to use 
'--no-install-recommends' as Karl mentioned in the original report.

Thanks,

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org