Daniel Burrows wrote:
Or, if nautilus is not a dependency of gdm, then why is it automatically installed because of gdm? I still feel like I'm missing something.Because: gdm Depends: gnome-session gnome-session Recommends: nautilus
Thanks for the clarifications, and the tip about 'aptitude why -v'. (That's a lot of packages!) I removed gdm, which in turn removed the majority of the automatically installed packages I wanted removed, including gnome-session and nautilus. Then I reinstalled gdm, which itself has only a few dependencies, gnome-session and nautilus not among them. That's the result I wanted, it was unclear to me whether doing it that way was the "right way" to achieve that result ("right" as in most efficient, least likely to have unintended consequences).
The thing is I was planning on keeping gdm, though I guess I could switch to xdm, or do without a display manager. But gdm, according to aptitude, shouldn't require nautilus. It shouldn't even require gnome-session, just one of gnome-session | x-session-manager | x-window-manager | x-terminal-emulator. I have Openbox and xterm installed, so I should be covered there, right?Then you need to remove gnome-session and replace it with something else.
That gets to the heart of my confusion about how this works, because I didn't *need* a replacement for gnome-session -- I already had packages installed that satisfied that requirement. But aptitude wouldn't automatically remove the automatically installed gnome-session unless I removed gdm. I could have manually removed gnome-session without breaking anything, but all that would have done was remove gnome-session -- that action would not have removed nautilus, even though nautilus was still installed because gnome-session recommended it. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems like going the route of removing then reinstalling gdm was the only way to take care of a lot of these packages that were hanging around in one fell swoop.
Anyway, none of this is a problem. I was just trying to understand what was going on and learn how to use the tools at hand better. I still have some odds and ends installed that I probably don't need, but I'll gradually weed them out.
And, probably in three months or so, I'll decide to give GNOME another go, and start all over. :-)
Michael M.