Bug#688772: Bug#681834: Call for votes on network-manager, gnome
Hi,
this is a reply to a message from the older bug but it has never
been answered and I believe it's useful to take a proper decision
so I answer in the new bug:
On Tue, 11 Sep 2012, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Jeremy Bicha writes ("Bug#681834: Call for votes on network-manager, gnome"):
> > I see two things missing from this resolution:
> >
> > 1. GNOME has a stronger dependency on NM than they did when Squeeze
> > was released. GNOME Shell now has a hard dependency on NM.
>
> Do you mean
> http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/gnome-shell
> ? Because that doesn't have any dependency on network-manager.
>
> So on a Debian wheezy system it is possible to install gnome-shell
> without network-manager. (There is a dependency on
> gir1.2-networkmanager-1.0 but that's just introspection data and
> doesn't pull-in n-m itself, just some libraries.)
Nobody responded to this but while discussing with the GNOME maintainers
I quickly got the answer. NM is a build-time dependency of GNOME Shell
but Debian has patched GNOME Shell to make it optional to allow
it to compile on kfreebsd:
http://patch-tracker.debian.org/patch/series/view/gnome-shell/3.4.2-2/10-make-NetworkManager-optional.patch
During run time, NM is not required but its absence results in:
- non-working network configuration screens in the GNOME settings
- empathy/evolution and the like not being aware when they are offline
and thus trying to connect when they should not (and generate/display
potentially annoying errors)
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
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