http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31860
Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org changed:
What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |scott@open-vote.org
--- Comment #25 from Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org 2012-10-19 18:52:47 CDT --- Again, the libraries are already on the recommends list. You are forcing Wine's install by explicitly disabling the installation of recommends, then complaining that the recommended packages are not installed.
The Wine package depends on libraries that are required for it to run (eg glibc). Stuff that Wine dlopens on demand (and degrades gracefully if unavailable) are placed in recommends. This is by Debian/Ubuntu policy, and this policy is entirely sensible: imagine what would happen if you were on a system that needed a Wine app but couldn't, for some reason, use the system-provided version of libxi6.
If I made this a dependency rather than a recommends, apt would refuse to install Wine even though many useful Wine programs would work perfectly (and even then only the animated cursors would not work in the ones that didn't).
This is a problem that only gets created when users who "know what they're doing" explicitly disable the installation of default-installed Recommended packages but actually need them.