Comment 24 for bug 620733

This is stupid. Empathy depends on a settings backend, so it should obviously depend on one, not recommend. In debian/control, you can write the dependency list like (libdconf0 | libgconf2-4) or whatever the right packages are.

Assuming that packages marked as Recommends will always be installed is a pretty naïve assumption on the packager's part. Not everyone that installs software conforms to their narrow world-view.

I thought Ubuntu was about making a Linux distro for human beings. Well, guess what — human beings are diverse. They have diverse systems, with diverse settings. Not everyone has Recommended packages installed by default. Not everyone magically knows that a package is part of something if it is removed and no alert is made because it is only a Recommend.

Making Empathy work properly only on the default setup and nothing more diverse is simply naïve. It should be a dependency, not recommend.