Bloom’s patch support could perhaps be used to change the default misc to more appropriate values. That would require some work, but would seem doable for at least stuff in ros_core and similar metapackages.
But should we perhaps consider adding support for categories to ROS package manifests? Packages could be placed in misc by default, but if the author/maintainer provides the metadata, Bloom could use that to populate the Section field.
RPM did have “groups”, but those seem to have been deprecated some time ago.
Entries without a * are pruned then, I gather? And the second column shows the cumulative sub total of the packages installed by (and for) that branch of the tree (but the trees only include a dependency if it wasn’t added somewhere else earlier (so lsb_release shows up with 23MB, but that’s probably because it depends on all sorts of Python dependencies which aren’t shown a second time))?
With some primitive scripting and a very manual process I’d arrived at a similar set of packages, but I hadn’t gotten ros-kinetic-ros-core down to 650 MB yet.
