Re: Holy Gnome3 Invasion, Batman! - Testing Upgrades 06/30/2013
On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Forgive the facetious thread title, please. I just about got knocked out of my
> socks this morning when I ran my daily upgrade checks in aptitude.
>
> I run Debian testing with Xfce, and I'd like to keep it that way.
Me, too.
> About a year ago I switched out Wicd for network-manager-gnome so that I could
> make use of the latter package's ability to control VPN connections. I guess
> that's the root cause of this little adventure. (However, IIRC, Xfce has started
> using network-manager-gnome instead of Wicd anyway.)
>
> This morning the usual upgrades included a gnome-bluetooth updgrade that wanted
> to pull in what appeared to be just about everything from the Gnome DE --
> roughly 117 packages. The gnome-bluetooth package was apparently on the system
> because the network manager wants it there.
>
> This was easy enough to prevent. I just held everything while I got rid of
> gnome-bluetooth and its playmates, then put a forbid on gnome-bluetooth. The
> ensuing upgrade attempt was a lot more reasonable.
>
> I don't suppose this really qualifies as a bug -- particularly since
> network-manager-gnome really is a part of the Gnome DE. But I imagine a few
> folks who use it in other DEs are going to be a little consternated by today's
> upgrades if they don't pay fairly close attention before committing to them.
>
> Thanks for reading my tale of woe (whoa?).
I think this happened because gnome-bluetooth recommends
gnome-control-center which in its turn depends on a bunch of stuff I
don't need (and most of which is not on my system) and recommends a
bunch more unnecessary stuff. The way I avoid what you saw this
morning is to tell aptitude NOT to install by default packages
recommended by other packages. That seems to prevent a lot of
unnecessary installations. So I recommend setting that option in
aptitude! You always have the option, after scanning what's
recommended, to install what you want.
Patrick
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