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

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Ian Jackson 

(Sorry about the delay in replying here)

> 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 can think of a bunch of fairly generic ways:

- update-rc.d disable
- dpkg-statoverride the binary to mode 000
- dpkg-divert away the binary
- make the init script (and possibly the dbus settings file) exit 0

In addition comes whatever method NM has for begin told to keep its
fingers off an interface.

> 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.

Then use policy-rc.d to prevent it from starting?

> 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.

If that happens, I'm fairly sure that's just a bug and one that the
people experiencing should file with enough information to debug it.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are