Josselin Mouette wrote:
> please don’t hesitate to make requests to the GNOME team if anything is
> wrong with the metapackages for the requirements of the installer. Going
> back to the pre-lenny situation, without synchronisation between the
> task and the metapackages, would be a huge mistake.
I just want to point out that the current inclusion of tomboy in the
default desktop install essentially came about by accident:
* Tomboy was not, afaik, included by default in stable. The gnome-desktop
task has never listed it, and gnome only had it as a recommends; tasksel
ignored recommends.
* After stable was released, many more maintainers began assuming recommends
would be installed by default. These recommends had to be manually
noticed and tracked in tasksel. IIRC there was a case where the omission
of a recommended package could have potentially left X nearly unusable.
(Don't remember the details.) At this point it became clear to me that
it was time to make tasksel install recommends by default, since
manually tracking them in tasks wasn't feasable going forward[2].
* At that point, I reviewed packages that were only in task lists
due to being recommended, and removed them. This had a nice benefit
in simplifying the gnome-desktop task[1].
* I only did a cursory look at the metapackages' recommends to see what
additional stuff they would pull in. I assumed some extra recommended
stuff would be pulled in, but hopefully not too much. I vaglely
remember notcing tomboy would be pulled in via a recommends, but
I probably figured the gnome team would notice it eventually and make
a decision, or the CD team would deal with any bloat issues later.
I note that we have a tendancy in Debian to allow changes to be made
essentially by accident or as a side effect, and then the result becomes
a status quo that we emotionally defend from change. I hope that doesn't
happen in this case.
The Gnome team needs to make a decision whether tomboy should be included
by default; this decision should probably be made with feedback from the
CD team[3]. The fact that a one line change to tasksel's code happened to
make it be included by default in unstable shouldn't be allowed to influence
the decision.
--
see shy jo
[1] changelog:
* Remove numerous things from gnome-desktop that the gnome
metapackage recommends. (menu-xdg, gparted, update-notifier,
liferea, tsclient, hardinfo, network-manager-gnome,
hal-cups-utils, gthumb)
[2] Especially since I am doing the absolute minimum Debian stuff this year.
[3] And probably considering the wider ramifications to, cf RMS.
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