Bug#403296: gnome: please dont depend on totem-mozilla, use recommend instead

[Loïc Minier]

On Sat, Dec 16, 2006, Kiro Zimmer wrote:
> I thought it would be useful for others who have this problem. The 
> unexperienced user doesnt know what depends on what and only wants to 
> deinstall totem-mozilla, because it cant play some content. This seems 
> impossible on the first look, if he has gnome installed.

 You're taking the problem from the wrong angle: why is the user
 installing "gnome" instead of "gnome-desktop-environment" in the first
 place?  Tasksel and hence debian-installer are pulling
 gnome-desktop-environment, not gnome.  People who pull gnome are
 pulling it to get a more GNOME-ish defaults than the "standard" one,
 and I consider it normal that it doesn't pull mplayer and that it pulls
 totem.  Please note that mplayer isn't even in testing today (but will
 soon be) and has zero integration with GNOME (libgnomeui, libgnomevfs,
 gnome-session...).

> With your solution he has to install all nine remaining packages which 
> gnome depens on by hand. Not even totem itself depends on 
> totem-mozilla, it only recommends it.

 Totem only provides the media player, not the mozilla plugin, this is
 normal.

> By the way, I would vote for metapackages, which for default only 
> recommend, instead of depend..., in the whole distribution :-P

 Yes, this would be the way to support customization of the
 meta-packages.  Recommends are currently not enforced strongly enough,
 this is why this is not possible, but changes are underway to make apt
 more strict to enforce Recommends.  When these changes will be in
 unstable, we will probably change the Depends into Recommends, but not
 before that.

> And just for the record: The problem of totem-mozilla is, that it isnt 
> in all cases able to play content, for which it hat the mediatype 
> subscribed. See the famous german website www.tagesschau.de/video
> as an example...

 File a bug or reassign this bug against either totem-xine or
 totem-gstreamer (depending what you use).

-- 
Loïc Minier <lool at dooz.org>
 "Forget your stupid theme park! I'm gonna make my own! With hookers!
  And blackjack! In fact, forget the theme park!"          -- Bender