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

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> I have taken the liberty of making a version of it with the small
> changes that I thought were appropriate.

> I've done this in the tech-ctte.git repo so you if you pull can see
> the diffs.  Below is the full text of my revised proposal.

> I've left my original proposal, and the original version of yours, in
> the git repo too, as it didn't seem right to just appropriate yours and
> make the changes off my own bat.

Per the last IRC meeting, here's an attempt to compact your version of my
draft down a bit and leave out as much of the stuff that isn't directly
on-point as I could.  I left all the other ones there so that one can see
all the varients (probably overkill, since Git would let you do that
anyway, but it seemed like a good idea at the time).

I think the upgrade point is the overriding one.  If it weren't for
upgrade behavior for users who have gnome-core + wicd or gnome-core plus
using ifupdown, there are various other possible alternatives, such as the
special metapackage handling, that might be okay.  But the upgrade
behavior currently is really suboptimal for people who have chosen to
replace network-manager.

Here's what I now have:

 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.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>