Bug#688772: gnome Depends network-manager-gnome

[Don Armstrong]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2012, Michael Biebl wrote:
> I've been discussing with jordi today about this issue.

Thanks for working on this.

> One idea that came up was to check wether wicd is in use (or for
> that matter ifupdown), and then show a debconf prompt explaining the
> situation, and letting the user chose if he wants to take over
> network management by NetworkManager. It would work similar to how
> we currently handle multiple installed display managers, like gdm3
> or kdm (btw, gdm3 is currently a hard depends of gnome-core). If the
> users choses no, we could disable the service via update-rc.d
> disable, so the invoke-rc.d later on in postinst would not start NM.

I believe some solution along this line which mitigates breakage
caused by the co-installation of wicd and NM would go a long way to
resolve the technical concerns of having gnome depend on NM.[0]

I'm concerned that such a solution won't be ready, tested, and
accepted in time for wheezy, however. But I can certainly see
proposing an option to have an explicit sunset on the CTTE's
requirement for gnome to only recommend NM once this work is done.[1]

> This would also help in situations where users install both wicd and
> network-manager by accident, which usually doesn't really work well
> since e.g. both spawn their own instance of wpa_supplicant.

Right. It would be awesome to have some kind of coordination between
NM and wicd (and anything else which potentially configures the
network in a conflicting way) so that they both present a similar
dialog box if the other is installed.


Don Armstrong

0: Indeed, I would have much rather seen this than what I proposed
previously in B, but as it requires substantial work on both your and
the wicd maintainers' parts, it's not something that the CTTE can
require.

1: Even though I personally don't think it's the right approach for
gnome to Depend on NM, it would no longer cause the technical problems
which make such a Dependency problematic enough for the CTTE to take
action.
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