Bug#363579: No, gnome-icon-theme isn't needed

[James Blanford]

On 20 Apr, Josselin Mouette wrote:

> 
> libgnomeprintui relies on gnome-icon-theme being present for the icons
> it uses. The configure.in explicitly checks the presence of this
> package, that's why I think it is needed. 

It is probably needed as a build-depends, so that it can take advantage
of the icons if they are present.  Nevertheless, it seems to work quite
fine without the icons when they are not present.  I notice that when I
select a printer, the descriptions present a default icon.  This is a
very minor loss and of no concern to me.

As a practical consideration, anyone who is running gnome will have the
icons as they are a dependency of gnome-core.  People who do not have
gnome installed are probably not interested in its icon support.

> 
> Putting it as a Recommends: instead sounds reasonable as we haven't
> received any reports of a failure without gnome-icon-theme installed.

The criterion is not whether anyone reports a bug, it is what Debian
policy has to say.  Accordingly, if the package retains a significant
portion of it's functionality without another package, then it does not
depend upon that package.  libgnomeprintui2.2-common does everything I
expect it to do without gnome-icon-theme.  The dependency relationship
between libgnomeprintui2.2-common and gnome-icon-theme barely meets the
standard of a "Suggests" let alone a "Recommends" or "Depends".

But a suggestion or a recommendation makes no difference to me, so long
as I can do without it, if I don't want it.