To me, Gnumeric looks like an example of why this would be undesirable. gnumeric Recommends: evince | evince-gtk, lp-solve, and gnumeric-doc. And you might reasonably want to install Gnumeric without any of those three. (It seems lp-solve currently isn't displayed only because openoffice.org-calc Depends: on it.)
Either Recommends: is just a synonym for Depends:, or it isn't. If it is, then it will seem redundant to new developers, making packaging unduly complicated. If it isn't, then we can report and fix inappropriate Recommends: values in existing packages, in the same way that we've been fixing bad package titles and descriptions.
To me, Gnumeric looks like an example of why this would be undesirable. gnumeric Recommends: evince | evince-gtk, lp-solve, and gnumeric-doc. And you might reasonably want to install Gnumeric without any of those three. (It seems lp-solve currently isn't displayed only because openoffice.org-calc Depends: on it.)
Either Recommends: is just a synonym for Depends:, or it isn't. If it is, then it will seem redundant to new developers, making packaging unduly complicated. If it isn't, then we can report and fix inappropriate Recommends: values in existing packages, in the same way that we've been fixing bad package titles and descriptions.