Re: Bug#718855: desktop=xfce installs Gnome stuff and evenmore gnome appears as the default window manager from lightdm
On 08/07/2013 10:22 AM, Josep Lladonosa wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I think that installation of complete Gnome even with the election of
> XFCE is caused by network-manager-gnome package. I use wifi connection
> to install from debian-installer.
>
> If this network manager is installed, then all Gnome installs, because
> its default configuration is to install recommended packages, as well.
>
> Instead, I tried to do:
>
> apt-get install network-manager-gnome --no-install-recommends
>
> and then only dependencies are installed (not all Gnome, only about 30
> MB. It was hundreds, with the default!)
>
> I don't know if this should be reported to network-manager-gnome
> maintainers, but I wanted to inform here (I know that in the past
> there was an intense discussion about this issue...)
>
I saw this slightly nightmarish scenario on my established Debian testing / Xfce
systems and got around it by telling aptitude (the package manger I use) to NOT
install recommends. Now I have to examine recommends each time I install
something to make the determination myself as to whether or not to install them.
On my systems I traced this problem back to the fact that the network manager
package requires gnome-bluetooth, and it is actually gnome-bluetooth that wants
everything else from gnome including the kitchen sink. If I purge
gnome-bluetooth from the Xfce systems, then aptitude no longer tries to pull in
gnome-control-center and gnome-session, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
I experimented by letting aptitude do its thing with all of the recommends from
gnome-bluetooth on one system just to see what the total effect would be. It was
awful. I wound up with lightdm having switched to gnome as the default session,
but even telling lightdm to use the Xfce session still had me logging into the
gnome DE. I purged all of the extra stuff from that system, and it's fit as a
fiddle now.
On all of my Xfce systems, the only non-installed recommended package shown in
Audit / Recommendations is gnome-bluetooth.
HTH,
J.
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