Bug#1086819: task-gnome-flashback-desktop: dependency on transitional network-manager-gnome

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2024 at 21:05:38 +0100, Holger Wansing wrote:
> Instead of maintaining a list of packages per desktop in tasksel (thus
> in task-*-desktop), managed by the installer-team (that has no deep insight,
> which package makes sense to be included in the respective desktops), we 
> would like to move to one (or more) meta packages per desktop, which are 
> maintained by the respective desktop teams, and that tasksel depends on.

(Please keep the maintainers of gnome-flashback in Cc when discussing
this - I am not one of them)

I agree this would be a good improvement, but GNOME Flashback doesn't
currently seem to have a suitable metapackage: the package named
gnome-flashback is an implementation detail rather than a metapackage, and
gnome-session-flashback seems to be intended to be the equivalent of
gnome-session, which is "smaller" than a complete desktop
metapackage. Adding a metapackage would require a trip through NEW,
for some source package.

I would prefer this to *not* be part of src:meta-gnome3, because most
uploaders of meta-gnome3 are concentrating on GNOME itself and are not
thinking about the GNOME Flashback spinoff. In practice, the primary
maintainer of GNOME Flashback in Debian seems to be Dmitry Shachnev.

It seems to me that doing this restructuring is orthogonal to whether
the existing task package has a dependency on a transitional package:
either one can be fixed without affecting the other.

    smcv