Does Debian's "apt-get install" command follow "recommends" links recursively?

Question

Debian's apt-get install command is documented as following recommends links by default. It also follows depends links, presumably in a recursive fashion. However, I haven't been able to find out if it also follows recommends links recursively.

For example, let's say that I run apt-get install foo and that foo depends on or recommends bar. I would expect apt-get to install bar and all of its dependencies. However, I don't know whether it would also install bar's recommended packages, etc. Can someone please clarify this?

Answer 1

AFAIK, yes: both APT::Install-Recommends apt.conf option and --install-recommends command-line option are "global" (i.e. they will be applied to recursive dependencies too).

Just checked that empirically and looked at the apt source code: apt dependency solver seems to apply the follow_recommends option recursively.