On Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:16:43 -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
Camaleón wrote:
Bob Proulx wrote:
I disagree. If the package isn't useful then removing it is very
likely the easiest solution. Why frustrate yourself trying to work
around the problem when removing the problem is a good solution too.
IMO, removing should be the last resort, the last thing to do.
No it is not. That is one of the strengths of Debian. You are free to
create a installation based upon what you want to have installed.
That's another and complete different thing.
For instance, I do not use NM on my workstation boxes nor Avahi-zeroconf
so I disable those, but I disable those not because I don't know how to
setup them but becasue I don't like what they provide. And I prefer to
keep them installed because they can be useful in some scenarios so I
keep them -disabled but installed-, they do not disturb my day-to-day
work.
I know that with some other distributions you are expected to have a
set bundle of packages installed and any deviation from that bundle
isn't tolerated very well. But that isn't Debian. In Debian it is
perfectly fine to install what you need and to not install what you do
not need or do not want. Really!
Yes, but Jerome was not complaining about a "bloated" system but how to
solve a specific problem he had with gnome-keyring and how to disable it.
He read the docs and did not found a convenient nor easy way to do what
he wanted to get. And I also think that in this case, the README file
lacks for basic instructions on what "exactly" has to be edited and in
what manner.
Should he had found this steps easily, I bet that gnome-keyring is still
on his system :-)
Maybe if the package is completely broken or if by-passes do not work
as expected, then it's okay to get rid off it (even in such cases I
prefer to first open a bug report at tell that something supposed to
work it fails). I like to understand how stuff works.
Of course understanding how things work is great. And filing bug
reports as appropriate improves things for everyone. But when software
is mostly a packaging of an upstream and the upstream isn't very
responsive or has their own vision and agenda then sometimes it just
isn't productive. You have heard the old RAH quote, "Never try to teach
a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig." Unfortunately
sometimes that is true of software projects too.
I really don't think this is a packaging/packager issue nor a problem
with unresposive devels...
Anyway, "gnome-keyring" is part of the GNOME security stack and
password management and I find it very convenient for this task, but
that's of course up to each user.
If it is good for you then that is great! I found that was completely
broken for my use and I had to work around it in order to make things
work for me. My workaround was much less pleasant than removing the
broken package. But I expect that either one or both of gnome-keyring
or libpam-gnome-keyring will be removed from my systems until the
offending behavior is corrected. And that is perfectly okay from a
Debian viewpoint.
Nobody said it's not okay to remove a package. I said (or wanted to
state) that removing a package because something is unknown (in this
case, how to widely avoid gnome-keyring-ssh from starting) is not what I
would have done, I don't like to surrender to my OS (being Debian or
whatever OS you prefer...), I prefer to fight>;-)
Greetings,