Bug#481114: gnome-system-tools: Inappropriate and unnecessary dependencies.

[洪任諭]

Package: gnome-system-tools
Severity: important

Gnome system tools, as its name implies, is designed for Gnome.
However, it's essetially quite desktop-independent and doesn't have
gnome dependencies once packaged properly.
Currently, apt-get install gnome-system-tools gives the whole gnome desktop
along with a lot of python-related packages. Ironically, gnome-system-tools
is perl-based, and it didn't use python at all. So this is an important bug.
After reading the source code, I have some suggestions regarding to packaging.

1. Split gnome-system-tools into two separate packages. I mean, put
   the nautilus share config tool in another package. It's the only tool that
   requires nautilus and gnome-vfs. Other parts of gnome-system-tools are
   all desktop independent and don't depend on gnome at all.
   There are configure options to let you choose which tools to build. So
   this is possible.
   In this way, people not using naultilus can install gnome-system-tools
   without any gnome dependency. This is a must-have for desktops other than
   gnome.

2. No program in gnome-system-tools used python. All of them are written in
   C, and their backend is totally written in perl. So please check the
   dependency again. Intalling many python packages with this is unnucessary.

I think this bug is very critical for the users who don't use gnome or nautilus.
Thank you very much.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=zh_TW.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=zh_TW.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash