Bug#688772: gnome Depends network-manager-gnome

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

I've been thinking about this over lunch, and I do feel like the gnome
metapackage is substantively different than the gnome-core metapackage.
I'm not sure if it's sufficiently different to warrant a different
decision, but it does seem different enough to warrant a separate
discussion.

The historic point of the gnome metapackage is not to just install the
base machinery of GNOME in the same way that gnome-core is.  It's rather
to give the user a complete desktop environment built around GNOME.  There
have historically been all sorts of applications in there that people may
or may not use.  It's a fairly "heavy-weight" metapackage; it pulls in
everything from office suites to a mail client.

We still have the upgrade problem with network-manager from squeeze gnome
to wheezy gnome, but I would expect, if I had the full gnome metapackage
installed, for quite a lot to potentially change across versions: new
applications added or dropped, new implementations of particular common
tasks to be blessed upstream, etc.  So I'm not sure if that's as strong of
a reason to stick with Recommends in that metapackage.

To be clear, if I were the GNOME maintainers, I would use Recommends.  But
I'm not, and I'd rather that they make the call as much as possible.
Putting aside the communication breakdowns and the heated arguments and so
forth, if just the gnome metapackage issue in its current form had come to
us cold, I'm trying to work through what decision I'd make.

I'm wondering if we should just document the change to the gnome
metapackage in the release notes.  I think there's really something to be
said for treating this as a compromise position.

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