Bonus packages in fai-mirror

[Andreas Sindermann]

Russel Hill writes:
 > We are building using fai-cd from a private package pool (a local subset 
 > of debian packages). Ordinarily, we build our private package pool by 
 > first building an ISO from more complete debian mirror. Then we 
 > post-process the access logs and built our private package pool from 
 > that list of packages. FWIW: This process has been working for us for a 
 > few years now.
 > 
 > We appear to be getting many spurious packages on our fai-cd. For 
 > example, aspell-en gets pulled in by fai-mirror and installed on the 
 > target system. Absolutely nothing in the package poolsdepends on 
 > aspell-en. The only thing I can see is that aspell-en is "Recommended" 
 > by some packages. However, there are other recommended packages that 
 > don't get installed.
 > 
 > aspell-en is only one example of a 'bonus' package. Our ISO has grown 
 > from 410MB with fai v3.1 to 560MB with fai v3.2.4. We can manually pull 
 > some of these spurious packages out but it's very tedious and time 
 > consuming.
 > 
 > Does anybody have a clue what might be causing this? I'd love a sensible 
 > explanation.

Perhaps in your package_config files you install with 'aptitude -r'
instead of simple aptitude?

Andreas