Bug#570579: xulrunner: please reconsider recommends for GNOME packages

[Mike Hommey]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 10:18:09PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote:
> Package: xulrunner
> Version: 1.9.1.8-2
> Severity: important
> Tags: d-i
> X-Debbugs-CC: tasksel at packages.debian.org
> 
> I was very surprised when I upgraded a KDE system to find that xulrunner 
> tried to pull in all sorts of GNOME packages. It was quite a bit of work 
> to unselect everything that got pulled in through those Recommends.
> 
> I'm talking about the Recommends for:
> - libdbus-glib-1-2
> - libgconf2-4
> - libgnome2-0
> - libgnomeui-0
> - libgnomevfs2-0
> And the deps for those packages are far from trivial.
> 
> I guess the change was introduced in 1.9.1.6-2 with:
>    Merge xulrunner-1.9.1-gnome-support into xulrunner-1.9.1.
> 
> But I question if the Recommends of those packages is policy compliant as 
> Recommends should only be used for packages "that would be found together 
> with this one in all but unusual installations" [1].
> And that's only true for systems running a GNOME desktop environment. For 
> systems running KDE the GNOME packages are not needed and even in a lot of 
> cases very much not desired.

Except that Iceweasel has various things that break when the gnome
libraries are not installed, such as icons for libgnomeui, and external
handlers for libgnomevfs and libgconf (it still does broken things under
KDE, but it actually works better than without).

The only one that really isn't strictly required in the libdbus-glib
one.

> I also question the value of the Recommends: if a user is running GNOME 
> they will all be installed already anyway!
> 
> As Debian Installer now installs Recommends by default and the desktop 
> tasks installs iceweasel for all desktops, this means that all those GNOME 
> packages would get installed on KDE desktop systems by default, 
> 
> As iceweasel is supposed to be desktop environment independent, I urge you 
> to reconsider this change. IMO the current Recommends make iceweasel 
> unsuitable for default installation.
> I also feel that for packages like iceweasel integration support for 
> specific desktop environments should always be optional.

Reality is different from theory. While Iceweasel is supposed to be DE
independent, it really isn't. Sad reality, but still reality.

Now, as I said, there are several things that will break if these
libraries are not installed (note you can still prove me wrong), but
there are things we can probably do to make things better:

- As said above, libdbus-glib-1-2 is not strictly necessary.
- IIRC, in 1.9.2, upstream switched most gnomevfs uses to gio, which is
  in glib. That may help making the dependencies lighter.
- There are patches for better KDE integration in opensuse, but we can't
  take them as-is.

The first two above could be worked in the squeeze time-frame. I doubt
the latter can.

In any case, dependencies on libgnome2-0, libgnomeui-0 and libgconf2-4
are here to stay, IMHO. I'd go as far as saying they should be strong
dependencies, but I allow those people that don't like gnome libraries
and who want to shoot themselves in the foot to do it.

Cheers,

Mike