On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 12:40:32PM +0200, Antony Stone wrote:

[cut]

> >
> > In most of the cases those dependencies do not come from upstream, and
> > have been instead introduced by Debian packagers, who have made a lot
> > of effort to entangle as tightly as possible hundreds of packges with
> > GNOME stuff.
>
> How does this work out on a Debian system when you select a different DE, then?
>

You still get gconf, gnome-keyring, and other goodies installed, even
if you are using xmonad. That's how it works out. And I personally
find it pretty annoying.

[cut]

>
> Again, I think the important question is "what percentage of Debian users want
> Gnome, and what percentage want something else?" That determines what degree
> of effort is worth putting into integrating, or separating, Gnome and the rest
> of Debian.
>

It seems like many packagers have decided for everybody, and embraced
the GNOME cause, which is why we will have even more dependency
problems to solve in the future.

Just to make an example, it is still very hard for me to understand
why a packge like grace (which is a lesstif program to produce X-Y
plots) should depend on gconf2. The motivation provided by the
maintainer is that he decided to include a thumbnailer which allow
GNOME-related file managers to provide a preview of grace files, and
gconf was not able to add the needed xml stanzas easily if it was not
already installed. Hence, they required gconf to be installed before
grace in order for this thumbnailer to be recognised by gconf. So they
added a useless dependencies on gconf to a lesstif program to plot
graphs just to please those users who happen to use the GNOME
ecosystem, a GNOME-aware file manager, and the damn lesstif program to
plot graphs (which is mainly used in batch scripts, BTW...).

You might think otherwise, but I remain convinced that this is just
*SICK*.

> > And all this comes from a "universal" operating system....
>
> I thought that just meant it runs on lots of different hardware, not that it
> aims to please all of the people all of the time?
>


You know it lately looks more like "universal = I make the decisions
and whoever doesn't like them should STFU". That's why we are here,
basically :)

HND

KatolaZ

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