Re: Network Manager cannot be removed
> > It's clearly a packaging bug.
> Not necessarily, gnome is just a metapackage pulling in a set other
> packages. Whether it should really bring in network-manager-gnome is
> debatable, of course; but you are free to remove the metapackage and use
> your own collection.
This answer is a cop-out. My machines have a Debian install that dates
back to 2003 (which I just clone when I need to install it on a new
machine), tracking `testing' on a weekly basis:
In order for such long-term installation to be viable, it's important to
have the right packages be marked as "manually installed". So if you
want to use "Gnome" and properly follow Gnome as it evolves, it's
important to install the `gnome' metapackage rather than some of its
descendants.
This said, maybe it's not a bug, indeed. Maybe it was decided for
example that wicd is not an acceptable replacement for network-manager
and that if you want not to use network-manager, then that means you
don't want to use Gnome (tho you may still want to use some subset
of it).
I'm not fond of wicd (I think its UI is pretty clunky), but at least
it's not as fundamentally flawed as NM (which didn't seem to understand
that Gnome is designed for POSIX systems which are by nature multi-user;
I hear there's some movement to try and fix it, but I still haven't seen
anything concrete in this respect).
Stefan
PS: In all fairness, NM's design aimed to accomodate VPNs at least as
much as wifi, and indeed VPNs suffer from the same kind of fundamental
flaws (as typically implemented in GNU/Linux).
Reply to: