Ian Jackson writes ("Re: Bug#681834: network-manager, gnome, Recommends vs Depends"): > I agree with almost all of this. It's a good analysis.
I have taken the liberty of making a version of it with the small changes that I thought were appropriate. I've done this in the tech-ctte.git repo so you if you pull can see the diffs. Below is the full text of my revised proposal. I've left my original proposal, and the original version of yours, in the git repo too, as it didn't seem right to just appropriate yours and make the changes off my own bat. Here is a discussion of the substantive changes: > Russ Allbery writes: > > This change is, so far > > as the Technical Committee understands, driven primarily by user > > confusion and bug reports, but does not reflect a deeper or tighter > > integration of network-manager into GNOME than was the case in > > squeeze. > > As I say I don't think there is any significant evidence of this. ... > I'm not happy with this statement in the absence of evidence (whether > in the form of bug reports or mailing list postings or whatever) from > users who are _actually confused_. I've simply removed that part of the assertion in my version of your proposal, leaving the part of about "deeper or tighter integration". > So I agree with most of your reasoning but I think your conclusion > needs to be a little stronger. I would say: > > > We therefore believe that > > network-manager should be moved to Recommends in gnome-core. Done in my version of your draft. > And you haven't addressed the question of whether this should be done > in wheezy. I have added a "wheras" and added a new "therefore" section containing the two concluding paragraphs from my draft, to make it clear exactly what the effect of the resolution is. So here's my proposal. I would be happy with this as a TC resolution, although it's quite wordy. Whereas: 1. The gnome-core metapackage is intended to reflect the core of the GNOME desktop environment: the basic tools and subsystems that together constitute GNOME. The gnome metapackage is intended to reflect the broader desktop environment, including extra components and applications. 2. network-manager is the GNOME network control system, and is recommended for most GNOME users. Some Debian GNOME users don't like some of network-manager's behavior and prefer to instead use other tools, either basic ifupdown or other frameworks such as wicd. 3. In squeeze, the gnome metapackage lists network-manager in Recommends but not Depends. In wheezy, currently, network-manager has moved from gnome to gnome-core, and from Recommends to Depends. This represents a substantially increased insistance that users of the GNOME metapackages have network-manager installed. This change does not reflect, so far as the Technical Committee understands, a deeper or tighter integration of network-manager into GNOME than was the case in squeeze. 4. If matters are left as they currently stand, users who have the gnome metapackages installed but do not have network-manager installed will, in the process of upgrading from squeeze to wheezy (either due to an explicit decision to remove it or an implicit decision to not install it by disabling automatic installation of Recommends), end up installing network-manager on systems where it is currently not installed. It will also no longer be possible for users to install GNOME metapackages in wheezy without installing network-manager. 5. For most applications and components, the only drawback of this would be some additional disk space usage, since the application, despite being installed, wouldn't need to be used. However, network-manager assumes that, if it is installed, it should attempt to manage the system's network configuration. It attempts to avoid overriding local manual configuration, but it isn't able to detect all cases where the user is using some other component or system to manage networking. The user has to take separate, explicit (and somewhat unusual for the average user) action to disable network-manager after it has been installed. 6. The Technical Committee believes that this will cause undesireable behavior for upgrades from squeeze, and (of somewhat lesser importance) will make it more difficult than necessary for GNOME users to swap network management components, something for which there appears to be noticable demand. We therefore believe that network-manager should be moved to Recommends in gnome-core. 7. Please note that this is not a general statement about GNOME components. It is very specific to network-manager because all of the following apply: (i) The package takes action automatically because it is installed, rather than being a component that can either be run or not at the user's choice. (ii) The package has historically been recommended rather than listed as a dependency, so existing Debian users are used to that behavior. (ii) There is both demonstrable, intentional widespread replacement of that package by Debian GNOME users and no significant loss of unrelated GNOME desktop functionality by replacing it with a different component. 8. If any of these points did not apply, the situation would be significantly different. Therefore: 9. The Technical Committee overrules the decision of the gnome-core metapackage maintainers. The dependency from gnome-core to network-manager-gnome should be downgraded to Recommends. 10. The Technical Committee requests that the Release Managers unblock the update to implement this decision, so that this change may be released in wheezy. Ian. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-ctte-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20535.50114.335226.140...@chiark.greenend.org.uk