Bug#681834: network-manager, gnome, Recommends vs Depends

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Russ Allbery writes ("Bug#681834: network-manager, gnome, Recommends vs Depends"):
> 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 don't know that we have investigated that.  But I do know that
having it install n-m might be a problem even if you can disable n-m
afterwards.  For example, n-m might break your network on
installation.

> 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.

Also ISTR reading some assertions in the discussion that people who
had previously installed n-m, found it troublesome and disabled it,
had it reenabled somehow.  Not installing something is generally a
more reliable approach than asking people to fiddle with its config.

Ian.