Bug#681834: network-manager, gnome, Recommends vs Depends
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Bdale Garbee writes:
>> Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu> writes:
>>> As a user, my expectation is that if I install a *meta* package, then
>>> the whole platform will be installed, and will be kept
>>> installed. That's the main reason I install meta packages.
>> I comprehend you, but to me the difficulty is in defining what "the
>> whole platform" means and thus where the boundary should lie. In the
>> current case, if someone says "I want Gnome", do they really expect
>> that to include network-manager to the exclusion of all other options,
>> or might they reasonably expect to be able to use wicd, or something
>> else, as an alternative?
> Quite.
> It has also been suggested that gnome-session would be a better
> package to install, but of course that excludes all of the gnome
> applications - which is probably what the user wanted in this case.
Do we know for certain that installation of network-manager excludes
alternatives? Tollef replied to me on debian-devel wondering why people
who don't want to use network-manager just disable it, which implies that
there's some means to turn it off while it's still installed. (I don't
think I ever investigated that.)
I'm not sure how significant that is to the decision, but it sounded like
people are assuming that having network-manager installed excludes use of
wicd or something else, so I want to be sure people aren't making
decisions based on false premises.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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