The technical committee was asked to consider overrulling the gnome-core metapackage maintainer's decision that gnome-core Depends: on network-manager. The committee has decided to overrule this decision. gnome-core should Recommends: network-manager, and the release team is requested to allow a gnome-core package which implements this change into wheezy. The full text of the decision is below: Whereas: 1. The gnome-core metapackage is intended to reflect the core of the GNOME desktop environment: the basic tools and subsystems that together constitute GNOME. The gnome metapackage is intended to reflect the broader desktop environment, including extra components and applications. 2. network-manager is the GNOME network control system, and is recommended for most GNOME users. Some Debian GNOME users don't like some of network-manager's behavior and prefer to instead use other tools, either basic ifupdown or other frameworks such as wicd. 3. In squeeze, the gnome metapackage lists network-manager in Recommends but not Depends. In wheezy, currently, network-manager has moved from gnome to gnome-core, and from Recommends to Depends. This represents a substantially increased insistance that users of the GNOME metapackages have network-manager installed; specifically, there is no longer any way to install any but the most minimal GNOME metapackage (gnome-session) without installing network-manager, and users who have gnome or gnome-core installed but have removed or never installed network-manager will have network-manager installed during an upgrade from squeeze. 4. For most applications and components, the only drawback of this would be some additional disk space usage, since the application, despite being installed, wouldn't need to be used. However, network-manager assumes that, if it is installed, it should attempt to manage the system's network configuration. It attempts to avoid overriding local manual configuration, but it isn't able to detect all cases where the user is using some other component or system to manage networking. The user has to take separate, explicit (and somewhat unusual for the average user) action to disable network-manager after it has been installed. 5. The Technical Committee believes that this will cause undesireable behavior for upgrades from squeeze, and (of somewhat lesser importance) will make it more difficult than necessary for GNOME users to swap network management components, something for which there appears to be noticable demand. We therefore believe that network-manager should be moved to Recommends in gnome-core. 6. Please note that this is not a general statement about GNOME components. It is very specific to network-manager because all of the following apply: (i) The package takes action automatically because it is installed, rather than being a component that can either be run or not at the user's choice. (ii) The package has historically been recommended rather than listed as a dependency, so existing Debian users are used to that behavior and will expect it to be preserved during upgrades. (ii) There is both demonstrable, intentional widespread replacement of that package by Debian GNOME users and no significant loss of unrelated GNOME desktop functionality by replacing it with a different component. If any of these points did not apply, the situation would be significantly different. Therefore: 7. The Technical Committee overrules the decision of the gnome-core metapackage maintainers. The dependency from gnome-core to network-manager-gnome should be downgraded to Recommends. 8. The Technical Committee requests that the Release Managers unblock the update to implement this decision, so that this change may be released in wheezy. === END === Complete logs of the discussion of this CTTE issue may be found in the BTS at http://bugs.debian.org/681834 and in the debian-ctte list archives. Don Armstrong -- We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk. -- Eleanor Roosevelt http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature