Comment 10 for bug 56742

I'm afraid I find the semantics of --without-recommends rather unintuitive, if not even useless.

Pretty please could you provide an option which means "I don't want to install the Recommends: packages but if they are already on my system, don't remove them"?

For example, just now:

vnix$ sudo aptitude install language-pack-en
<... eek, wants to install openoffice.org-help-en-us and whatnot, even though I don't have OpenOffice on this server-only system ...>
0 packages upgraded, 17 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 22.5MB of archives. After unpacking 74.4MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.

vnix$ sudo aptitude install --without-recommends language-pack-en
<...>
The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
  libjpeg-progs miscfiles openssl postfix resolvconf ssl-cert wamerican xli
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
  language-pack-en-base
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  language-pack-en language-pack-en-base
0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 8 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1385kB of archives. After unpacking 3355kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.

vnix$ # cripes

As a workaround, I "aptitude installed" those packages I wanted to keep on my system (postfix? sounds good. openssl? Yeah, I guess) and only then proceeded to install language-pack-en --without-recommends