Comment 28 for bug 154349

Ok, I look forward to the software-store and will have a look at its feature list. But until then I need synaptic to roam through the trees of dependencies. So I took the challenge and made a patch for this over-aged bug.

The problem I found: synaptic once changed its config location to /root/.synaptic/synaptic.conf. And because no other tool would ever read this file, synaptic filters out all config tags that do not start with "Synaptic::". That's why "APT::Install-Recommends" does not get stored anymore.

Since about Ubuntu 8.10 it was decided that the built-in default "false" is not optimal. Therefore the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01ubuntu was created, containing one line:

APT::Install-Recommends "true";

With that in mind I tried to make my patch as minimal-invasive and robust as possible: whenever synaptic stores its config, a file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/03synaptic is also written, containing the above line ending with "true" if the corresponding checkbox is checked or "false" otherwise. This file overrides preceding files like ../01ubuntu. And if writing fails for some reason then the only consequence is a message sent to stderr.

I tested this patch against synaptic-0.62.7ubuntu6 of Ubuntu 9.10 and it works for me. Now comments of testers are welcome and then I hope there'll be someone who does the packaging in time for Lucid.

A note for testers:
You can dare to "./configure ; make ; sudo make install". This will only write to /usr/local/ and a "sudo make uninstall" is also available.