On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 7:16 AM, Jeff Lasman <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm betting that Ubuntu is aiming at people who don't ask for anything > special; otherwise why would they not offer kde-desktop in their > Synaptic setup? I'm going to talk to Jono Bacon (I presume he still > works there) about this, as I believe it's bad for the community. > Well, I doubt it's a Canonical decision at all. Synaptic is just a front-end to the apt system. There's no way that it has specific rules per package. So no opportunity for Ubuntu to decide what to show/not show on a per-package level. I'm not hip to all the intricacies, but I guess kde-desktop is some kind of meta-package. Nothing in it but pointers to other packages. So that makes it special. I don't use Synaptic, but maybe it handles meta packages differently? Perhaps there's a configuration option that makes them display or not display? Or maybe it's already installed and so it doesn't show it? Hard to say. But I think it extremely unlikely to be a choice by the distro. Synaptic, apt, ... are all snapshots from Debian Unstable, and quite likely have little or no specialization. -- John.
