Re: Why for gnome-software, is gnome-software-plugin-deb listed twice?
On Fri, Mar 28, 2025 at 8:27 PM Jeremy Bícha <jeremy.bicha@canonical.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 7:10 AM Zeke Williams <lakeleaf8@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Browsing through the packages pages on the debian website, I noticed
> > that at https://packages.debian.org/trixie/gnome-software you'll find
> > 'gnome-software-plugin-deb' listed twice. One as mandatory dep and
> > again as rec. Why? It's confusing because I absolutely loathe using
> > gnome-software for apt updates and would absolutely rather use it for
> > flatpak packages only.
>
> That page is not giving you precise enough information about what the
> dependencies look like.
>
> gnome-software has
> Depends: gnome-software-plugin-deb | gnome-software-plugin
>
> where gnome-software-plugin is a virtual package provided by any of
> the separate gnome-software-plugin-* packages.
>
> gnome-software also has Recommends: gnome-software-plugin-deb so that
> the package is correctly installed for people upgrading from Debian
> 12. I think for Debian 14 that we'll move this Recommends to gnome or
> gnome-core.
>
> gnome-software-plugin-deb is a separate package that can now be
> removed but this wasn't possible in Debian 12.
>
> > Could it be possible in trixie to configure it to never use PackageKit
> > and only for snap/flatpak packages? In addition, it uses appstream
> > metadata for the packages and more often than not, graphical
> > applications like firefox-esr is not searchable for the deb package,
> > but you'll get results for the flatpak package.
>
> Yes, already answered above.
>
> Thank you,
> Jeremy Bícha
Thank you! It's a relief I can have flatpak and gnome-software
together without dragging in functionality from packagekit. Why is it
that debian 12 didn't have this? Design limitations or time
limitations? I'm sure there was a reason, but I want to know more.
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