Bug#688772: gnome Depends network-manager-gnome

[Russ Allbery]

Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org> writes:

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

That's not what section 6 says.  It says:

    (ii) There is both demonstrable, intentional widespread replacement of
       that package by Debian GNOME users and no significant loss of
       unrelated GNOME desktop functionality by replacing it with a
       different component.

You dropped the word "unrelated" in your objection, but I put that word in
there intentionally precisely because I think there *is* loss of
functionality, but it's functionality directly related to the decision
that the user is making.

There is clear loss of networking configuration functionality in GNOME by
removing Network Manager.  But that's exactly the choice that the user is
making: giving up Network Manager network configuration functionality in
favor of something else.  Presumably they're making an informed choice
about the value of the lost functionality to them, since it's directly
related to the component that they're replacing.

The situation would be considerably different if removing Network Manager
caused significant loss of *unrelated* functionality: functionality of the
desktop other than network configuration.  Indeed, in that case I would
consider Depends to be entirely appropriate even for gnome-core.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>