3 1. The gnome-core metapackage is intended to reflect the core of the
4 GNOME desktop environment: the basic tools and subsystems that
5 together constitute GNOME. The gnome metapackage is intended to
6 reflect the broader desktop environment, including extra components
9 2. network-manager is the GNOME network control system, and is
10 recommended for most GNOME users. Some Debian GNOME users don't like
11 some of network-manager's behavior and prefer to instead use other
12 tools, either basic ifupdown or other frameworks such as wicd.
14 3. In squeeze, the gnome metapackage lists network-manager in Recommends
15 but not Depends. In wheezy, currently, network-manager has moved from
16 gnome to gnome-core, and from Recommends to Depends. This represents
17 a substantially increased insistance that users of the GNOME
18 metapackages have network-manager installed. This change does
19 not reflect, so far as the Technical Committee understands, a
20 deeper or tighter integration of network-manager into GNOME than
21 was the case in squeeze.
23 4. If matters are left as they currently stand, users who have the gnome
24 metapackages installed but do not have network-manager installed will,
25 in the process of upgrading from squeeze to wheezy (either due to an
26 explicit decision to remove it or an implicit decision to not install
27 it by disabling automatic installation of Recommends), end up
28 installing network-manager on systems where it is currently not
29 installed. It will also no longer be possible for users to install
30 GNOME metapackages in wheezy without installing network-manager.
32 5. For most applications and components, the only drawback of this would
33 be some additional disk space usage, since the application, despite
34 being installed, wouldn't need to be used. However, network-manager
35 assumes that, if it is installed, it should attempt to manage the
36 system's network configuration. It attempts to avoid overriding local
37 manual configuration, but it isn't able to detect all cases where the
38 user is using some other component or system to manage networking.
39 The user has to take separate, explicit (and somewhat unusual for the
40 average user) action to disable network-manager after it has been
43 6. The Technical Committee believes that this will cause undesireable
44 behavior for upgrades from squeeze, and (of somewhat lesser
45 importance) will make it more difficult than necessary for GNOME users
46 to swap network management components, something for which there
47 appears to be noticable demand. We therefore believe that
48 network-manager should be moved to Recommends in gnome-core.
50 7. Please note that this is not a general statement about GNOME
51 components. It is very specific to network-manager because all of the
54 (i) The package takes action automatically because it is installed,
55 rather than being a component that can either be run or not at the
58 (ii) The package has historically been recommended rather than listed as
59 a dependency, so existing Debian users are used to that behavior.
61 (ii) There is both demonstrable, intentional widespread replacement of
62 that package by Debian GNOME users and no significant loss of
63 unrelated GNOME desktop functionality by replacing it with a
66 8. If any of these points did not apply, the situation would be
67 significantly different.
71 9. The Technical Committee overrules the decision of the gnome-core
72 metapackage maintainers. The dependency from gnome-core to
73 network-manager-gnome should be downgraded to Recommends.
75 10. The Technical Committee requests that the Release Managers
76 unblock the update to implement this decision, so that this
77 change may be released in wheezy.