Re: Holy Gnome3 Invasion, Batman! - Testing Upgrades 06/30/2013

[Jape Person <japers@comcast.net>]

On 06/30/2013 04:01 PM, Jochen Spieker wrote:
> Patrick Wiseman:
>> On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Forgive the facetious thread title, please. I just about got knocked out of my
>>> socks this morning when I ran my daily upgrade checks in aptitude.
>>>
>>> I run Debian testing with Xfce, and I'd like to keep it that way.
>>
>> Me, too.
> 
> I know it is nitpicking and slightly beside the point, but still: only
> because apt wants to install (parts of) Gnome, it doesn't force you to
> run it.
> 
> Sure, you should be able to install exactly what you want and nothing
> more, but even a few hundred megabytes don't really need to bother you
> on a desktop system less than ten years old. Even if you install KDE,
> Gnome, Xfce and every other desktop system you can think of, the Debian
> installation does not necessarily use more than, say, 10-12GB.
> 
> I don't even use one of the big desktop environments but like to have at
> least Gnome and Xfce installed, just in case someone else wants to use
> my computer. (I usually use the „awesome“ window manager which is
> awkward to use for the uninitiated).
> 
>> […] The way I avoid what you saw this
>> morning is to tell aptitude NOT to install by default packages
>> recommended by other packages. That seems to prevent a lot of
>> unnecessary installations. So I recommend setting that option in
>> aptitude! You always have the option, after scanning what's
>> recommended, to install what you want.
> 
> ACK, I do that too. From my /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/local:
> 
> APT {
>     Install-Recommends "false";
> }
> 
> Aptitude {
>     Recommends-Important    "false";
>     Keep-Recommends         "true";
>     Keep-Suggests           "true";
> }
> 
> J.

Certainly, I think I get your point here. But 117 packages is truly a bit much
for a curmudgeon like me to buy. This appeared to be the bulk of the Gnome
desktop. And I have seen "competing" DEs installed on the same system interfere
with each other in some pretty annoying ways. It's not as though they have no
effect whatsoever on each other. The most irritating interactions I've dealt
with personally are the ways in which the DEs can (I should say "could",
perhaps, since this was some time ago.) affect each other through things like
update-alternatives. What works for one may not work so well for another.

And then there's the fact that stuff I don't need is stuff I don't need. I might
be able to put up with a little avoirdupois on my system, I suppose. But the
added weight plus even the possibility that I might encounter an unwanted
interaction is more than enough to get me to avoid wholesale introduction of new
packages onto my systems. If I don't need the function, I don't need or want the
packages.

But -- if, like you -- I had a system on which I used a window manager like
awesome and which I wanted to be able to share with users who wanted or needed a
DE, it would certainly make sense to install a couple of the more popular DEs.
It's not like they'd be likely to get in my way when I was just using the window
manager.

BTW, I told aptitude to not install recommends as Patrick suggested, then
re-installed gnome-bluetooth. It just pulled in the data package plus a couple
of orphaned packages that I removed this morning after blowing away
gnome-bluetooth. This outcome is much superior from my standpoint (and, I
assume, Patrick's) to the landslide of additional packages I was looking at this
morning.

So...my problem was that I was just using my package manager improperly.
(Self-inflicted wounds are always the most irksome, aren't they?) The aptitude
default setting of installing recommends probably works okay for Gnome and KDE,
but perhaps a little less so for Xfce or the even more minimalist DEs.

Regards,
J.