Bug#688772: gnome Depends network-manager-gnome

[Josselin Mouette]

Hi Stefano,

Le jeudi 27 septembre 2012 à 15:12 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit : 
> What worries me is the apparent lack of an important information: the
> greater goal/mission that the GNOME team have in mind.  OTOH, the spirit
> of the recent tech-ctte decision can be summarized as: "allow users to
> opt-out of N-M + respect past (Squeeze) user choices to do so".
> 
> I'm at loss at formulating a similarly succinct goal for the GNOME team.
> Maybe members of the GNOME team can help with that?

Our goal regarding metapackages is to ensure that people wanting to use
GNOME have the standard set of packages that we agree on to support
best.

Also, it has been repeatedly stated that metapackages are not a
supermarket. They don’t contain anything, and people can make their own
if they don’t like them. If they work for 95% of users, that goal is
reached. The remaining 5% also happen to be those with the ability to
deal without them.

> *If* the main point is adhering to an agreed upon notion of "*default*
> GNOME environment", any easy to use opt-out mechanism (including
> Recommends) should work, no? So I guess I am, and others with me,
> missing a relevant part of GNOME team's goals on this matter. If these
> goals can easily be stated, maybe we won't even need further votes and
> imposed decisions. Maybe we can just find a consensual course of action
> that both respect user choices *and* adhere to GNOME team greater goals.

Recommends are not enough to ensure that packages are installed,
especially upon upgrades. For example regarding NM, we definitely *want*
people who upgrade from squeeze to get NM installed.

As for the opt-out mechanism, it already exists, and is called “service
network-manager disable”. In the same way that most (if not all) GNOME
packages, once installed, can be disabled one way or another - be it by
unshowing menu entries, locking dbus services or disabling init scripts.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
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