Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> I have taken the liberty of making a version of it with the small
> changes that I thought were appropriate.
> I've done this in the tech-ctte.git repo so you if you pull can see
> the diffs. Below is the full text of my revised proposal.
> I've left my original proposal, and the original version of yours, in
> the git repo too, as it didn't seem right to just appropriate yours and
> make the changes off my own bat.
Per the last IRC meeting, here's an attempt to compact your version of my
draft down a bit and leave out as much of the stuff that isn't directly
on-point as I could. I left all the other ones there so that one can see
all the varients (probably overkill, since Git would let you do that
anyway, but it seemed like a good idea at the time).
I think the upgrade point is the overriding one. If it weren't for
upgrade behavior for users who have gnome-core + wicd or gnome-core plus
using ifupdown, there are various other possible alternatives, such as the
special metapackage handling, that might be okay. But the upgrade
behavior currently is really suboptimal for people who have chosen to
replace network-manager.
Here's what I now have:
Whereas:
1. The gnome-core metapackage is intended to reflect the core of the
GNOME desktop environment: the basic tools and subsystems that
together constitute GNOME. The gnome metapackage is intended to
reflect the broader desktop environment, including extra components
and applications.
2. network-manager is the GNOME network control system, and is
recommended for most GNOME users. Some Debian GNOME users don't like
some of network-manager's behavior and prefer to instead use other
tools, either basic ifupdown or other frameworks such as wicd.
3. In squeeze, the gnome metapackage lists network-manager in Recommends
but not Depends. In wheezy, currently, network-manager has moved from
gnome to gnome-core, and from Recommends to Depends. This represents
a substantially increased insistance that users of the GNOME
metapackages have network-manager installed; specifically, there is no
longer any way to install any but the most minimal GNOME metapackage
(gnome-session) without installing network-manager, and users who have
gnome or gnome-core installed but have removed or never installed
network-manager will have network-manager installed during an upgrade
from squeeze.
4. For most applications and components, the only drawback of this would
be some additional disk space usage, since the application, despite
being installed, wouldn't need to be used. However, network-manager
assumes that, if it is installed, it should attempt to manage the
system's network configuration. It attempts to avoid overriding local
manual configuration, but it isn't able to detect all cases where the
user is using some other component or system to manage networking.
The user has to take separate, explicit (and somewhat unusual for the
average user) action to disable network-manager after it has been
installed.
5. The Technical Committee believes that this will cause undesireable
behavior for upgrades from squeeze, and (of somewhat lesser
importance) will make it more difficult than necessary for GNOME users
to swap network management components, something for which there
appears to be noticable demand. We therefore believe that
network-manager should be moved to Recommends in gnome-core.
6. Please note that this is not a general statement about GNOME
components. It is very specific to network-manager because all of the
following apply:
(i) The package takes action automatically because it is installed,
rather than being a component that can either be run or not at the
user's choice.
(ii) The package has historically been recommended rather than listed
as a dependency, so existing Debian users are used to that
behavior and will expect it to be preserved during upgrades.
(ii) There is both demonstrable, intentional widespread replacement of
that package by Debian GNOME users and no significant loss of
unrelated GNOME desktop functionality by replacing it with a
different component.
If any of these points did not apply, the situation would be
significantly different.
Therefore:
7. The Technical Committee overrules the decision of the gnome-core
metapackage maintainers. The dependency from gnome-core to
network-manager-gnome should be downgraded to Recommends.
8. The Technical Committee requests that the Release Managers unblock
the update to implement this decision, so that this change may be
released in wheezy.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
