Recommended packages don't show up as addons in USC

[Jeremy Bícha]

software-center-gtk3 trunk r2202, Ubuntu Ocelot
software-center 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04

1. Go to the screen for "Battle for Wesnoth".
2. Scroll down to the "Add-ons" section.

What you see: There is none.
What you should see: There is one, with a checkbox for "music files for Wesnoth (branch 1.8)".

According to the specification, if package A recommends or suggests package B, then package B should show up as an addon of package A in Software Center. This isn't happening. A specific example is wesnoth-1.8 which recommends wesnoth-1.8-music.

If it's not desired to show all recommended or suggested packages as addons, then the specification needs to be updated so that packagers know what to expect.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#Add-on_packages

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: software-center 4.1.18
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-9.12-generic 3.0.3
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-9-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Aug 25 06:26:15 2011
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: software-center
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Alex Solanos (hakermania)]

I'm also affected by this bug, with i386 architecture though... It happened on my application's DEB package, which 'Recommends' an other package, which didn't show up as an Add-On on USC.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

apt-get install takes a "--no-install-recommends" flag. So if that's accessible from aptdaemon, I guess USC could use it while still requesting the installation of those add-ons that are checked.

By default that would have exactly the same effect as apt-get install without --no-install-recommends, being different only if you'd unchecked anything.

[Carlos Jenkins Pérez (carlos.jenkins)]

I'm also affected by this bug. The Software I'm developping doesn't shows it's 3 recommedations as a USC addons. I noticed this happens to other software in repos like "rednotebook".

In rednotebook you have:

Recommends: python-gtkspell, python-webkit, python-chardet

And none are shown.

In my case, my package has:

Recommends: texlive, texlive-publishers, xdg-utils

And none are shown either, nor installed, they are just ignored. This is quite undesirable because the user will have and under-featured software without knowing why, and without an easy ability to fix it. The only solution is is installing recommendations by hand via terminal, which is quite advanced for basic users.

[Takkat (takkat-nebuk)]

Confirming this in Precise am64. Recommends of a package (here ubuntu-restricted-extras) are shown as add-on only after this package was installed.

[dino99 (9d9)]

That version is no more maintained

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Reproduced in 13.10 on Ubuntu 14.04; reopening.

The problem might be that the recommendations are not being calculated transitively. “wesnoth” does not Recommend wesnoth-*-music, but it Depends on wesnoth-1.10, which does Recommend wesnoth-1.10-music.