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Recommends, Suggests, and Enhances Fields‌


The Recommends and Suggests fields describe dependencies that are not compulsory. The rec- ommended dependencies, the most important, considerably improve the functionality offered by the package but are not indispensable to its operation. The suggested dependencies, of secondary importance, indicate that certain packages may complement and increase their respective utility, but it is perfectly reasonable to install one without the others.

You should always install the recommended packages unless you know exactly why you do not need them. Conversely, it is not necessary to install suggested packages unless you know why you need them.

The Enhances field also describes a suggestion, but in a different context. It is indeed located in the suggested package, and not in the package that benefits from the suggestion. Its interest lies in that it is possible to add a suggestion without having to modify the package that is concerned. Thus, all add-ons, plug-ins, and other extensions of a program can then appear in the list of sug- gestions related to the software. Although it has existed for several years, this last field is still largely ignored by programs such as apt or synaptic. The original goal was to let a package like xul-ext-adblock-plus (a Firefox extension) declare Enhances: firefox, firefox-esr and thus appear in the list of suggested packages associated to firefox and firefox-esr.


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