John Hasler wrote:
That's not strictly correct. They can be removed only if you don't care about getting any new real packages. If, for example, a new basic Gnome program came out and was added to the dependencies of the gnome package, most people would probably want to get that automatically, so it is generally a good idea to keep those meta-packages around.s. keeling writes:And the downside is, you might say:apt-get remove $SOME_GNOME_PROGRAM and it will also remove Gnome (if you let it); Ditto KDE.Gnome and KDE are metapackage which have no contents. They exist only to pull in all the real packages they depend on. Once that is done they serve no purpose and can be removed with impunity.
Regards, Matthew