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