Lindsay Sprinter <zlinw@mcmedia.com.au> writes:
I like a clean tight system without any extra items I cannot use. I found I could only do this with dselect, both aptitude and synaptic installed other items "depends" , ie "recommends" and "suggests" inspite of what one wanted. I found at the time a tried these one simply could not get around this so matter what one did.
As I explained upthread, Recommends are opt-out by default in Debian 6 and 7. If dselect doesn't honor that, that's a bug. If you had BOTHERED to read the manpages, you would have seen aptitude --without-recommends aptitude --with-recommends apt-get --no-install-recommends apt-get --install-recommends ...which modify this behaviour on a per-invocation basis. It also describes how to change the default behaviour: echo >>/etc/apt/apt.conf 'APT::Install-Recommends "0";' Suggests are opt-out by default, and always have been. I don't care if you want to keep using dselect, but you might want to find a new a rationale for doing so.