No, I'm not bored - just curious what the other camps are up to. This time: openSUSE 12.1. Of course, after a minimal installation a few things are missing. Manpages, for example. But what the hell is this:

   $ zypper install man
   The following NEW packages are going to be installed:
     cups-libs fontconfig ghostscript-fonts-other ghostscript-fonts-std 
     ghostscript-library groff groff-devx lcms libfreetype6 libgimpprint
     libjpeg62 liblcms1 libpng14-14 libtiff3 man 

   The following recommended packages were automatically selected:
     ghostscript-fonts-other ghostscript-library 

   15 new packages to install.
   Overall download size: 14.9 MiB. After the operation, additional 67.8 MiB will be used.

15 new packages, almost 70 MB for a bunch of text files. And why would I need cups-libs or libjpeg62? Luckily, zypper too can be tought not to install recommended packages:

   $ zypper install --no-recommends man
   The following NEW packages are going to be installed:
     groff man 

   2 new packages to install.
   Overall download size: 2.4 MiB. After the operation, additional 10.0 MiB will be used.

Much better :-) There's an installRecommends switch in /etc/zypp/zypper.conf, but this was not honored by zypper 1.6.18 :-\

Sadly, this does not help with all packages:

   $ zypper install --no-recommends nginx
   The following NEW packages are going to be installed:
     fontconfig gd libfreetype6 libGeoIP1 libjpeg62 libpng14-14 libxslt1 nginx-1.0 
     xorg-x11-libICE xorg-x11-libSM xorg-x11-libX11 xorg-x11-libXau 
     xorg-x11-libxcb xorg-x11-libXext xorg-x11-libXpm xorg-x11-libXt 

   16 new packages to install.
   Overall download size: 3.0 MiB. After the operation, additional 11.8 MiB will be used.

Really? openSUSE has bundled a webserver with Xorg libraries? Sigh... I can already smell the b0rkage when the next update is due and zypper is trying to untangle all the dependencies for every friggin' package ever installed because of insane dependencies like this.

Oh, and while we're at it: you might want to remove patterns-openSUSE-minimal_base-conflicts otherwise lots of packages won't install.