Bug#989845: pulseaudio: Needless Depends: on libasound2-plugins should be turned back into Recommends:

[Dennis Filder]

Package: pulseaudio
Version: 14.2-2
Severity: normal
Control: found -1 0.99.1-1
X-Debbugs-CC: d.filder at web.de

While investigating #963582 I took a closer look at the dependencies
of pulseaudio, and I noticed something odd: As part of the changes for
0.99.1-1 the Recommends: on libasound2-plugins hard-coded in
debian/control was turned into a Depends:.  The commit message in
question[0] just reads: "tweak depends slightly" which is very quaint
considering that the transitive Depends: closure of libasound2-plugins
includes (among others) libavcodec58 and weighs in at a grand total of
200 MB.  The context of the changelog suggests that this was done to
make the package more similar to how Ubuntu packages pulseaudio, and
the maintainer just didn't realize the ramifications.

Considering that this was probably just a mistake and the inordinate
amount of additional disk space usage incurred by it I think this
change should be undone.

Regards,
Dennis Filder

0: https://salsa.debian.org/pulseaudio-team/pulseaudio/-/commit/89438173a5e1ad86b28763e28924baceb26b88a6