Hi. I've also had/have several times problems with those meta pacakges forcing me to install stuff I don't like (or I consider even unsecure).
NM is surely an example of this (just grep CVE in the changelog). Another one is gnome-bluetooth... there are so many systems which don't have bluetooth at all,... and you have to install many stuff and daemons that eat up performance just for nothing. In gnome2 I' just made an empty equivs package for this,... but gnome3 (well at least gnome-shell) does not even work anymore without gnome-bluetooth Now you cannot even disable the applet in the panels that shows you the annyoing bluethoot logo and eats up precious panel space... Nevertheless,.. why cant you make the metapackages to make more use of recommends instead of depends. If there's something that's really crucial for gnome, even for a minimal core version of gnome, like dconf/gconf, nautilus, the libs, and things like that, use depends,... for things like eog/evince or stuff like NM, which gnome runs without, make recommends. Not sure about how to handle things like pulseaudio... I never needed it in gnome2, and all my applications just ran fine. Now I need it, and actually, gnome3's mixer applet does not run correctly without.. So I've installed it,... and now my sound makes crackling noise... *sigh* Guess it would be good (and typical for Debian) not to force users too much on something, at least if possible. Cheers, Chris.
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
