Bug#454063: Dependencies of the 'gnome' package should be recommends, at least until a decent mime preferences editor exists

[Enrico Zini]

Package: gnome
Version: 1:2.14.3.6
Severity: wishlist

Hello,

In testing installed with the 'desktop' and 'gnome' tasks, gnome depends
on gnome-office, that depends on abiword, that opens .odt files instead
of openoffice.org, and this is currently annoying people around me (and
me as a consequence)>

I cannot remove abiword without removing gnome, and if I do that, lots
of packages will be marked for removal because they've been
autoinstalled pulled in by gnome.

There is not, TTBOMK, a decent mime type preference editor that I can
let people use to configure the system to use a different word processor
by default.

My alternatives now are either to remove gnome and remark other packages
as manually installed, or use equivs to provide a fake abiword.
Therefore, at this point, there seems to be no way to have
openoffice.org as the default word processor without expert user
intervention.  In my experience, this is a *very* common use case.

A simple way out could be to have the gnome metapackages just
Recommends: the other packages, at least until a decent mime preference
editor comes out.


Ciao,

Enrico


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-3-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=it_IT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash