Bug#681834: network-manager, gnome, Recommends vs Depends

[Ian Jackson]

Michael Biebl writes ("Bug#681834: network-manager, gnome, Recommends vs Depends"):
> We thus tried a compromise, where the network-manager postinst script
> automatically comments out dhcp-type connections in /e/n/i (and restores
> them, in case the package is removed again,fwiw).

So just to be clear: consider the case where a user has deliberately
violated the Recommends in squeeze from gnome to network-manager, and
now upgrades to wheezy.  They will get network-manager back via the
hard dependency from gnome-core.  Presumably they don't want to
deinstall `gnome', so they don't have a choice about that.

If their networking is using a dhcp entry in /etc/network/interfaces,
the result of installing n-m will be that this entry will be commented
out.  So the networking will break.  Furthermore, your proposed
workaround ...

> Disabling network-manager via "update-rc.d network-manager disable" is a
> reliable and clean way to stop network-manager from running. It won't be
> magically re-enabled on upgrades or restarted, since invoke-rc.d
> respects if a sysv service is disabled this way.

... will not put it back.  That just goes to show why installing an
undesired package and disabling it is not a particularly good way to
avoid any breakage it causes.

And that's before we even consider bugs in the maintainer scripts.

If the user's networking is using wicd then installing n-m will
probably cause both wicd and n-m to manage the same interface ?  That
won't work well - it will probably break the networking - but at least
disabling the n-m as above and restarting everything (perhaps
rebooting) ought to fix it.

Ian.