Comment 5 for bug 270512

Bug 51774 is about silent-failure behavior when forwarding X11 without xauth(1) on the remote side, which is a separate issue. Colin, you yourself said that a package dependency doesn't address that, and I agree.

I also agree with Thierry's premise that those X11-related packages should not be pulled in by openssh-client, and would go further to say that they have no place in an out-of-the-box CLI install. (I filed bug 293313 before fully understanding what was going on.)

I'd like to see xauth downgraded to Suggests: in both the client and the server. It's silly for either of them to pull in x11-common et al. unless explicitly told otherwise via --no-install-recommends, and in any event we're talking about a behavior that didn't even exist before the change to apt earlier this year. More people are still accustomed to installing xauth/xorg explicitly if they need it, than to relying on the Recommends: to do it for them; we're not going to see hordes of hapless users running around because they can't forward X11 connections anymore.

When apt was changed to install Recommends: by default, Michael Vogt said, "We should also clean up recommends were appropriate and downgrade them to suggests and sent the patches [to] debian." I think this is a case where that is needed.

If the downgrade on -client and -server is too much, then at least do it for -client. Systems with xorg will already have xauth, so the only case left is systems without X11 serving as an intermediate SSH hop between systems that do (and does *that* rare case warrant polluting minimal CLI installs with X11 libs?).