Currently, one has to manually pull in all associated -dev and -doc packages when installing something, if they wish to have these present. What I would propose, is adding a facility to apt-get and friends that would allow automagical installation of these associated packages without resorting to relying on "recommends" and "suggested" packages (which would also pull in other, likely unwanted, packages). A way to read all installed packages and pull any existing -dev and -doc packages for them would be welcome as well. Of course, seperate handling of each of these (-dev and -doc) would be best, if this were implemented at all. Example: apt-get --get-doc --get-dev install foo Installing packages: foo foo-doc foo-dev Recommended packages to be ignored: foo-bar .... and so on.