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

[Julian Andres Klode]

On Do, 2011-03-17 at 01:44 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le jeudi 17 mars 2011 à 00:39 +0100, Milan Niznansky a écrit : 
> > gnome-full is very developer-logical but IMO not really intuitive for a
> > user
> > 
> > I would suggest "debian-desktop" or "gnome-desktop",its name shall speak
> > for itself for Debian hacks and beginners alike.
> 
> But it would be confusing with gnome-desktop-environment, and with the
> gnome-desktop source package.
> 
> > However, Even if the "gnome" package gets a better name, the issue of
> > its problematic removal will still stand.
> > 
> > Probably not only me would feel it more intuitive if its direct
> > dependencies are installed(or marked) non-automatically in default
> > install. So that when user tries to remove some of them they do not run
> > into the issue I and the OP have.
> > 
> > IMO it is a much rarer situation someone wants to remove gnome per se
> > than getting rid of just a few packages here and there.
> > And for removing gnome he needs a guide regardless while the packages
> > could be installed in a way their removal is effortless.
> 
> 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.
APT supports special-casing meta package dependencies as manually
installed based on sections, and a section is requested in Bug#574851,
although ftpmaster did not want comment it in its one year of existence.

-- 
Julian Andres Klode  - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member

See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.