Bonus packages in fai-mirror

[Henning Sprang]

Russel Hill wrote:
> [...]
> 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. 

I'd not care too much about fai-mirror, but true, there shouldn't be a 
difference between installed packages when using fai 3.1.8 versus 
3.2.4... at least if such things are expeted, it should be documented in 
the changelog (and, if possible, what the user can do to keep the old 
set of packages).

> 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.

Can you check that the places where you identified "recommend" 
dependencies not being installed versus the ones where recommendations 
are possibly pulled in use the same "PACKAGES" lines, or not?

Different PACAKGES lines behave differently.

> Does anybody have a clue what might be causing this? I'd love a sensible 
> explanation.

Not sure, but maybe the default install options (the one that is 
triggered by "PACKAGES install" ) has changed.

Here's the extract from install_packages:

...
my $aptopt='-y -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" -o  \ 
Dpkg::Options::="--force-confold"';
...
%command = (
           "install" => "apt-get $aptopt --fix-missing install",
     "inst-internal" => "apt-get $aptopt --fix-missing -s install",
	   "remove" => "apt-get $aptopt --purge remove",
   "dselect-upgrade" => "apt-get $aptopt dselect-upgrade",
          "taskinst" => "tasksel install",
            "taskrm" => "tasksel remove",
              "hold" => "dpkg --set-selections",
    "clean-internal" => "apt-get clean",
          "aptitude" => "aptitude -R $aptopt install",
        "aptitude-r" => "aptitude -r $aptopt install",
...


So, when using aptitude, no recommends should be pulled - aptitude-r 
should pull them.

With a line using  "install", using apt-get will also take any 
configurations that might have been happened in a hook before the 
install task into account.

Is there anything in the logs about when and why the recommends are 
pulled in?


Henning