Actually, I withdraw this bug. After spending all day researching this, I have determined that if we use Recommends, dpkg will not provide any facility for telling the user about recommended packages. This seems like a much worse situation than extra packages getting installed, so I am marking the bug as WONTFIX.
That's not quite true. The splits I want to make are: * Depends * Build-depends * Recommends or suggests Typically, recommends are pulled in and suggests aren't. This is configurable (usually I turn on no-recommends on servers.) apt-get/aptitude will do whatever the configuration says, also it means that if you remove one of these, it doesn't mark the primary package as broken.