On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 09:37:50AM +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Tom Furie <t...@furie.org.uk> wrote:
> > In your example above, while gnome depends on openoffice, openoffice
> > cannot be removed without also removing gnome and thus anything that was
> > pulled in by gnome. However, while it is /nice/ to have an office suite
> > in your desktop environment it is by no means a requirement, therefore
> > if the gnome->openoffice relationship was downgraded to a Recommends:
> > the openoffice package could be removed without any further disruption
> > to the system.
>
> Ah! That might be the solution. I haven't dug into it, but if that's
> how the base desktop environment metapackages are done now, that would
> cure this issue. You install Debian with whichever desktop, then
> uninstall all the games, but you still have a perfectly viable system.
Unfortunately that is not how the meta-packages are done now. All that
has changed is that instead of dependencies of the meta-packages being
marked as automatically installed they are now marked as manually
installed, which means when you remove the meta-package everything that
it pulled in is left behind.
To further use the on-going illustration: if you have gnome installed
and it depends on openoffice, when you remove openoffice the gnome
meta-package must also be removed, but now all of the other packages are
left on the system. This at first glance seems like a good idea as apt
didn't "try to remove my whole system", however now all those packages
that are dependencies of gnome don't have a meta-package covering them
and so to remove them you have to track them individually.
The intention of the package relationships was supposed to be -
Depends: This package won't run unless you have this other package
installed.
Recommends: This package will run without this other package, but
possibly with reduced functionality.
Suggests: This package will run fine without this other package, but the
other package would be nice to have along with this.
This seems to have been lost somewhere along the way.
Cheers,
Tom
--
I am NOT a kludge! I am a computer!
-- tts
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