Bug#285912: gnome-desktop-environment should not recursively depend on hotplug

[David Madore]

Package: gnome-desktop-environment
Version: 62

It seems that gnome-desktop-environment has recently begun depending
(indirectly, through gnome-volume-manager and hal) on hotplug and
udev:

vega david ~ $ sudo apt-get --purge remove hotplug
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome-desktop-environment* gnome-volume-manager* hal* hotplug* udev*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 3088kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.

This is wrong: it should be quite possible to use Gnome (including the
gnome-desktop-environment meta-package, to make sure one has all the
necessary stuff) without bringing in all the mess of hotplug (because
of the oddities of my hardware, hotplug wreaks more havoc than you can
possibly imagine; this certainly doesn't mean I shouldn't have
Gnome!).  So one of the dependencies along the line must be weakened
to "recommends" or something.  [Incidentally, the problem is recent, I
think, so it's probably more like a mistake that should be fixed than
like a real design decision.]

Basically, there's no justifiable reason why a desktop environment
should care about the hardware (precisely the reason why it has
"abstraction layers" - duh).

-- 
     David A. Madore
    (david.madore@ens.fr,
     http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/ )