Comment 7 for bug 252044

I've subscribed Martin, who made this change.

revno: 1216
committer: Martin Pitt <email address hidden>
branch nick: platform.intrepid
timestamp: Thu 2008-07-17 11:03:14 +0100
message:
  move aptitude from minimal to supported-sysadmin; not needed by default, and pulls in lots of dependencies

"Not needed by default" is certainly accurate (it hasn't been used by the installer for some time). I haven't assessed its dependencies recently although it's perhaps worth noting that libxapian is now used by synaptic too. I think moving it out of minimal was the right decision (it's valuable for the system produced by debootstrap to be small rather than having lots of nice-to-have packages), but perhaps supported-sysadmin is too far out and we should revisit this.

Bruce, comments such as 'It's yet another nail in the coffin of Ubuntu and "ease of use" I suppose' aren't productive, and only serve to make developers less interested in looking at this bug. I'd appreciate it if you tried to avoid pouring vitriol into bug reports and concentrated on straightforward reasoning instead.