[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#980218: network-manager: Recommend, rather than Depend on wpasupplicant for systems with no wifi

[John Lines]

Package: network-manager
Version: 1.28.0-2+b1
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

There are many systems which do not have any form of wifi hardware at
all, and yet Network manager runs on them, usually pulled in by
something else. As examples:
* this system, which is an ethernet connected desktop
* the system I intend to migrate to as my firewall, running Freedombox
 which depends on network-manager, but has no wifi
* virtual machines

This is related to #919619, and I appreciate the need for easy setup for
laptop users, but the dependency does impose a burden on resources for
people who are not using network-manager on a laptop.

Would it be possible to create a dummy 'no-wifi' package and have that
as an alternative to wpasupplicant and depend on that as an alternative.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/24 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_CRAP, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser          3.118
ii  dbus             1.12.20-1
ii  libaudit1        1:3.0-2
ii  libbluetooth3    5.55-3
ii  libc6            2.31-9
ii  libcurl3-gnutls  7.74.0-1
ii  libglib2.0-0     2.66.4-1
ii  libgnutls30      3.7.0-5
ii  libjansson4      2.13.1-1
ii  libmm-glib0      1.14.8-0.1
ii  libndp0          1.6-1+b1
ii  libnewt0.52      0.52.21-4+b3
ii  libnm0           1.28.0-2+b1
ii  libpsl5          0.21.0-1.1
ii  libreadline8     8.1-1
ii  libselinux1      3.1-2+b2
ii  libsystemd0      247.2-4
ii  libteamdctl0     1.31-1
ii  libudev1         247.2-4
ii  libuuid1         2.36.1-4
ii  policykit-1      0.105-29
ii  udev             247.2-4
ii  wpasupplicant    2:2.9.0-16

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  dnsmasq-base [dnsmasq-base]  2.82-1
ii  iptables                     1.8.6-1
ii  libpam-systemd               247.2-4
ii  modemmanager                 1.14.8-0.1
ii  ppp                          2.4.9-1+1
ii  wireless-regdb               2020.04.29-2

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
ii  isc-dhcp-client  4.4.1-2.2
pn  libteam-utils    <none>

-- no debconf information