Bug#958455: From a minimum installation of Sid, metapackage enlightenment installs neither X nor a login manager. Debian Sid, 15 april 2020

[Ross Vandegrift]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 07:06:29AM +0000, Daniel Tourde wrote:
> Now I am not really sure I really grasp what you mean with 'Suggests'. Would
> it be a message on the console saying "Well, if you need a login manager
> please install now package 'x-display-manager'? That's an option

Well, not quite.  By default apt will just tell you that a package you're
installing has suggested another.  For example it might look like this:

  $ sudo apt install enlightenment
  Reading package lists... Done
  Building dependency tree
  Reading state information... Done
  The following additional packages will be installed:
    ... enlightenment ... (lots of stuff)
  Suggested packages:
    ... x-display-manager ... (potentially lots of stuff)
  The following NEW packages will be installed:
    ... enlightenment ... (lots of other stuff)
  0 upgraded, 278 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  Need to get 158 MB of archives.
  After this operation, 623 MB of additional disk space will be used.

You would need to notice that x-display-manager is in the Suggested list, and
then install it yourself.  So I don't think this will really help.

Alternatively, you can run `apt install --install-suggests` - but you need to
know that you want the suggestions first.

> The other option is to have a 'enlightenment-desktop' metapackage which
> install enlightenment and a simple login-manager (even though it is not
> EFL-based).

Without a natural choice (ie, EFL-based or something), I don't want to add a
metapackage just for this.  A standalone window manager will usually need
additional pieces anyhow - I don't think I can effectively curate that list for
all users.

Ross