[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#993747: network-manager-gnome: only Recommend network-manager

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Hey Michael.

On Mon, 2021-09-06 at 08:21 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Well, that doesn't make any sense to me. nm-applet without 
> network-manager is completely disfunctional, so it definitely is a
> hard 
> depends.

Well I haven't tested it on all possible users of the applet, but here
in cinnamon, if NM itself isn't running, the applet icon simply
disappears.

Since there doesn't seem to be a strict actual dependency on the other
package, I though it could have been nice for some special setups to be
able to avoid those.
Normal installations would still get it (because of the Recommends) or,
as said, meta-packages could strongly depend on it, if they think it
would be necessary (but even there one could argue, that some people
might want to configure their network e.g. via systemd and not having
anything else like NM or ifupdown at all).


It kinda seems to me like any other front-end that "fails" gracefully,
when the backend isn't there.
Consider e.g. the sound applet, when one has no sound server running
(or even no sound card at all). Or something like a GUI database
management, where it's not said that the DB server runs even on the
local machine.




>   My recommendation is, if you don't want the selection that meta 
> packages make for you is to not use those meta packages.

Wouldn't work at least for e.g. cinnamon, where the package
("cinnamon") is not just an empty meta-package, but also contains
further stuff needed.

Plus, having (and using) these meta-package is definitely helpful for
end-users to see whether something newly was added, that they really
need to install.


Cheers,
Chris.