I just want to check with the experts that this is normal, because it seems quite odd to me: when I recently updated my debian-12 template, I saw an unusual amount of newly installed packages as part of the update. This includes a bunch of compiler stuff due to build-essential getting installed, as well as python3-dev. I am surprised these things are being installed, since I keep my template as minimal as possible. Is this normal and expected? Or is this an issue unique to my system?
I ran aptitude why build-essential and it explains that it got installed by the chain qubes-vm-recommended → qubes-mgmt-salt-vm-connector → salt-ssh → salt-common → python3-virtualenv → build-essential. When I run apt policy salt-common it shows that salt-common comes from the qubes debian repo, so this is a qubes specific package. From the output of aptitude it seems that both build-essential and python3-dev are “recommended” due to the installation of python3-virtualenv. So are these packages even really necessary?
From searching online I found that it is possible to configure debian to avoid installing any dependency that is marked “Recommended” (as opposed to required). Is it safe to configure a qubes debian template in this way? I.e. is it possible that the qubes specific package “salt-common” really NEEDS python3-dev?
Thanks in advance for anyone that can give any help on these questions!