Il 25/05/2022 10:33, Paul van der Vlis ha scritto:
you are right, I also have many customers who only use webmail (and I had underestimated them) and IM client installed also seem much less used recentlyOp 23-05-2022 om 13:00 schreef Fabio Fantoni:Il 23/05/2022 01:42, Glauber Baldez ha scritto:Some considerations for project improvement:1. Debian should already offer users a minimal installation mode similar to Ubuntu, without media players, games and office applications.2. Debian should follow Doug Gwyn's words in stating that Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing smart things; the operating system must trust the user. Writing this, a big problem is not knowing how to differentiate the desktop environment from desktop applications, treating these factors as if they were the same thing. For example, the user cannot be prevented from removing the default web browser (desktop application) to replace it with another one of their choice as this breaks the desktop environment. Where's the freedom? I repeat again: desktop environment and desktop applications are not the same thing, so they shouldn't be treated as such either.Hi, thanks for your mail with suggestion to improve the project.I'm one maintainer of the cinnamon team, in the years I did some changes to make possible to have minimal installation of cinnamon. cinnamon (the package) without recommends is the very minimal. In some cases users had reported changes that had added unnecessary packages to the dependencies that I had then modified or removed and made some tests both on debian and ubuntu but unfortunately I can not do them often because they take a long time (both installation and quick functional tests) so report or advice from users are always useful.cinnamon-core and cinnamon-desktop-environment are 2 metapackage, the first for minimal desktop environment and second full. In the full one there are browser, media player and mail client are depends (libreoffice instead is already in recommends), one users recently required to remove browser and media player from depends but I added some alternative instead (in 5.2.2) thinking that are "essential software" for a full DE metapackage without recommends.I was wrong and I should move them to the recommends? Any reply/suggestion from other maintainers or users is appreciated. Sorry for my bad english.In my opinion it would be better to use recommends.I like to use a mail client myself, but many people want to use webmail these days for example. And many people don't use an IM client.
in fact more and more users are using other browsers or browsers from flatpack (or others like snap)Some people like to install a browser from outside Debian, like "Brave Browser" or a flatpack with the latest Firefox.
also this is right but it seems to me better that some packages still remain as dependencies by calculating other cases, for example as those who do a "lighter installation" without recommends, but that does not become "too small" to make the meta package not useful for that part of usersSuch a meta-package is good to install many packages at once, but it would be nice to have the possibility to remove them individually.
I support many people with Debian, what I often see is that they remove a package, and then also the meta-package is removed. And later all dependencies of the meta-package are removed by accident.
this is not in all cases, David Kalnischkies explained in his reply
Just my 2 cents...
thanks for your mailabout cinnamon-desktop-environment for next version I moved browsers, mail clients, media players and instant messaging clients from depends to recomends, I also thought about the pdf viewer a bit but for now I think it's better that it stays in the dependencies. while the rest of the dependencies seem to me to be quite used, generally relevant and/or with too few users that I suppose they would like to remove to move them to recommends. any other advice, data or considerations are appreciated
With regards, Paul
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