Bug#688772: gnome Depends network-manager-gnome

[Don Armstrong]

On Sat, 06 Oct 2012, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le vendredi 05 octobre 2012 à 16:46 -0700, Don Armstrong a écrit : 
> > So, besides the important goal of a complete gnome experience,
> > there's no other technical reason why NM must be installed?
> 
> Why would there be?

If for example, network-manager was so inextricably linked to gnome
that it caused a particular kind of breakage such that it wasn't
reasonable for anyone who wanted the other gnome bits not have it
installed.

>  * The affirmation that this will cause undesirable upgrade behavior
>    is grossly exaggerated.

From what I understand, nm and wicd are not capable of co-existing.[1]
Furthermore, nm does not always catch that other systems (such as
ifupdown) are configuring the interfaces, and may lead to broken
behavior on upgrade (such as #656584 and #688355, just glancing at
it).

>  * The reason for the historical Recommends instead of Depends is
>    not mentioned, while this history is used as an excuse for the
>    whole decision.

What was the reason?

>  * The claim that NM can be replaced by another component without
>    functionality loss is preposterous.

Which functionality loss are we talking about? For simple
configurations, it seems quite possible to replace NM with ifupdown
with no loss of functionality. 

>  * The excuse of the squeeze→wheezy upgrade serves as a basis for a
>    seemingly irrevocable decision that affects all future versions
>    of GNOME metapackages.

No CTTE decision is irrevocable. It's trivial to come back to the CTTE
and get us to sunset a decision. I personally would also not have had
a problem making this decision for the gnome meta packages only in
wheezy, with some transition plan to be worked out in the future.

Finally, in the future, please bring forward all of these concerns
about what the CTTE is deciding during the actual decision process so
we can address them.
 
> I don’t think what we do with GNOME affects autopkgtest, curl or
> hashalot.

It affects the users of Debian, which is what we're here for. [I'm
certainly not spending a nice Friday evening trying to sort this all
out for my own personal use of Debian.[2]]


Don Armstrong

1: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=681834#215
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