Bug#563712: Cannot remove Gnome-games, Cheese, Empathy, Ekiga, Epiphany, Remmina, Rhythmbox without removing Gnome

[Paul Taylor]

My apologies for the inappropriate report. I am new to Linux, (it's been about two months now), and even newer to Debian, (about 3 weeks). There's a whole culture here in which I don't yet know my way around; sometimes I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole!

Best Regards

Paul Taylor



----- Original Message ----
From: Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org>
To: Paul Taylor <jenningsthecat at yahoo.ca>; 563712 at bugs.debian.org
Sent: Mon, January 4, 2010 2:52:23 PM
Subject: Re: Bug#563712: Cannot remove Gnome-games, Cheese, Empathy, Ekiga, Epiphany, Remmina, Rhythmbox without removing Gnome

Le lundi 04 janvier 2010 à 11:13 -0800, Paul Taylor a écrit :
>> Current Behaviour: Using Aptitude or Synaptic to try to remove
>> Gnome-games, Cheese, Empathy, Ekiga, Epiphany, Remmina, or Rhythmbox,
>> results in an inability to remove these packages without removing
>> gnome and/or gnome-desktop.

Indeed.

> Expected Behaviour: Using Aptitude or Synaptic to try remove any of
> the applications listed above, (and any other applications on which
> the basic functionality of Gnome does not depend), should result in
> the removal of the application(s) specified without removing gnome, or
> gnome-desktop, or any other critical components.

You seem to completely misunderstand the purpose of gnome and
gnome-desktop-environment. These are metapackages, not regular packages.
Removing them is not going to break any functionality per se.

> With the exception of Remmina, (which was not installed), I have
> removed all of the above apps from Gnome 2.26 running on Ubuntu
> Intrepid without any problems, so it's clear that these dependencies
> under Gnome 2.28 on Debian are spurious. I am sure there are many
> other users who will never use some or all of the above apps, (and
> probably others as well), and we should be able to remove these apps
> and reduce system clutter without breaking Gnome.

If you don’t like the default package selection, it’s very simple: don’t
use the metapackages. This package selection is here for random people
with 100GB+ disks (like all disks sold for the last few years), who
don’t care about “system clutter” and just want a working desktop. If
you want a system with reduced size, there is a gnome-core package which
only depends on the required components.

> Because it's a toss-up whether this is a Gnome problem or a Debian
> packaging problem, I have filed it with both Gnome and Debian. (I
> filed the report with Gnome before having read the Debian direction to
> not file upstream).

This is completely unrelated to upstream. I don’t know what makes you
think that they would have anything to do with our metapackages.

Cheers, 
-- 
.''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'   “I recommend you to learn English in hope that you in
  `-     future understand things”  -- Jörg Schilling



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