Bug#563712: Cannot remove Gnome-games, Cheese, Empathy, Ekiga, Epiphany, Remmina, Rhythmbox without removing Gnome

[Milan Niznansky]

On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 01:44 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le jeudi 17 mars 2011 à 00:39 +0100, Milan Niznansky a écrit : 
> 
> But it would be confusing with gnome-desktop-environment, and with the
> gnome-desktop source package.
> 
Still, "debian-desktop" would not confuse anybody. It would make a nice
counterpart to "ubuntu-desktop", making even more sense.

> This is the most frequent request about the metapackages. It would be
> possible to mark a larger part of their dependencies as Recommends, but
> unfortunately, the way APT currently works, they would not be installed
> upon upgrades.
> 
Not really, I am very much OK with the stuff included in the "gnome"
package.

What I am not OK with, is its use by the default installation procedure.
IMO such a super-metapackage should not be used as the sole guaranteer
of the "installation-safety" of independent packages like Liferea.

Such packages could be installed explicitly, not as dependencies.
This should also make the upgrades even safer as they would not get
accidentally removed when they get dropped from the "desktop"
super-metapackage.

The structure I would love to see is this:

Default installation installs _explicitly_:
 "gnome" super-metapackage
  - "gnome-desktop-environment" metapackage
  - whatever packages whose presence depended solely-and-directly on the
"gnome" metapackage

Then it might make sense to also make some further metapackages to help
differentiate stuff.
Say let's include all by-default-installed games into a new metapackage
"debian-desktop-games" an make this package a direct dependency of
"gnome" as well as explicitly installed. 
That way upgrades are easy&safe, non-essential stuff is easy to remove
and users do not encounter any end-of-world warning when it.
The same can be made for other thematic package groupings so that in the
end no single package gets installed explicitly, on thematic
metapackages do.

Does it make sense? I am far from an apt guru so ...


Best Regardas,
Milan Niznansky