Bug#474875: Gnome package "granularity"

[Alexandre Lymberopoulos]

Hello,

I'm posting here because I believe that there are many dependencies in
both gnome and gnome-desktop-environment that could be optional
software to most users.

As examples we have browsers and mail software should not be
mandatory. They could be just recommended allowing to the user decide
to have it or not in the system. Take a look at evolution for example,
his libs use around 90MB and most of GNOME users never use it since
webmail systems like gmail are here to stay. I'm not shure how
eveything else on gnome depends on evolution and evolution-data-server
to keep them as Depends and not recommended.

ekiga is very good, I use it, but for the sake of flexibility and disk
space saving it could be recommmended too. The same for totem, except
on the fact that I don't use it.

A package providing a minimal desktop environment with the gnome look
(which is in my opinion the best) should be available and then provide other
packages depending on it, like gnome-browser (with flexibility to
choose which one to install), gnome-music (with exaile or rythym box),
gnome-video (with totem or mplayer), gnome-openoffice and so on. There
could be also a package gnome which is the actual gnome.

This would allow users to have a gnome based system fitting closer to
their needs, without changing the whole gnome at all. It is also a
good way to provide a flavor of gnome small enough to please users and
builders of live systems with both gnome look and specialized software
in "small" capacity media.

Hope to hear from you soon

Thanks in advance,
Alexandre
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Alexandre Lymberopoulos - lymber at gmail.com
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