Dear all

Is there any possibility to overrule the package dependencies without
modifying the package source?

Reason for asking: I do not need to have doc packages installed on all
of my servers. But some packages simply insist on installing their
doc package too.

In /etc/apt/preferences, I marked the packages with Pin-Priority: -1
-- but is there another way too?

Thanks for any hints.

wbr,
Lukas
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Lukas Ruf <http://www.lpr.ch> | Ad Personam
Consecom <http://www.consecom.com> | Ad Laborem


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On 2009-12-30 09:37 +0100, Lukas Ruf wrote:

> Is there any possibility to overrule the package dependencies without
> modifying the package source?

Not really. While rebuilding from source is not strictly necessary, at
least you'll have to modify the binary package(s).

> Reason for asking: I do not need to have doc packages installed on all
> of my servers. But some packages simply insist on installing their
> doc package too.

What do you mean by "insist"? If they recommend the doc package, you
can easily overrule that. If they depend on it, that is a bug and you
should report it.

Sven


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On Wed,30.Dec.09, 09:37:16, Lukas Ruf wrote:
> Dear all
>
> Is there any possibility to overrule the package dependencies without
> modifying the package source?
>
> Reason for asking: I do not need to have doc packages installed on all
> of my servers. But some packages simply insist on installing their
> doc package too.

Could you please point to concrete packages? I doubt any package will
*depend* on the respective -doc package, but will rather *recommend* it.

There are many ways to deal with this, here are 3 I know of:

1. (My preferred way for desktop machines) in aptitude's interactive
mode you can easily choose not to install a recommended package

2. Invoke your package manager with the relevant switch for one-time
installation without recommends

3. set

APT::Install-Recommends "false";

in /etc/apt/apt.conf to globally disable installation of recommends.

Beware though that, since lenny, apt installs recommends by default and
some packages will be missing important functionality as some of the
previous depends have been moved to recommends (they were not strictly
required for the package to work).

Regards,
Andrei
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> Andrei Popescu <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> [2009-12-30 10:06]:
>
> On Wed,30.Dec.09, 09:37:16, Lukas Ruf wrote:
> > Dear all
> >
> > Is there any possibility to overrule the package dependencies without
> > modifying the package source?
> >
> > Reason for asking: I do not need to have doc packages installed on all
> > of my servers. But some packages simply insist on installing their
> > doc package too.
>
> Could you please point to concrete packages? I doubt any package will
> *depend* on the respective -doc package, but will rather *recommend* it.
>

texlive-base *depends* on texlive-doc-base

> There are many ways to deal with this, here are 3 I know of:
>
> 1. (My preferred way for desktop machines) in aptitude's interactive
> mode you can easily choose not to install a recommended package
>
> 2. Invoke your package manager with the relevant switch for one-time
> installation without recommends
>
> 3. set
>
> APT::Install-Recommends "false";
>
> in /etc/apt/apt.conf to globally disable installation of recommends.
>

Thanks for these hints. They help downstripping...

wbr,
Lukas
- --
Lukas Ruf <http://www.lpr.ch> | Ad Personam
Consecom <http://www.consecom.com> | Ad Laborem
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> Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> [2009-12-30 09:59]:
>
> What do you mean by "insist"? If they recommend the doc package, you
> can easily overrule that. If they depend on it, that is a bug and you
> should report it.
>

texlive-base depends on texlive-doc-base -- I'm gonna report it.

Thanks.

wbr,
Lukas
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Lukas Ruf <http://www.lpr.ch> | Ad Personam
Consecom <http://www.consecom.com> | Ad Laborem


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