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
24 gnome metapackages installed but do not have network-manager
25 installed (either due to an explicit decision to remove it or an
26 implicit decision to not install it by disabling automatic
27 installation of Recommends) will, in the process of upgrading from
28 squeeze to wheezy, end up installing network-manager on systems
29 where it is currently not installed. It will also no longer be
30 possible for users to install GNOME metapackages in wheezy without
31 installing network-manager.
33 5. For most applications and components, the only drawback of this would
34 be some additional disk space usage, since the application, despite
35 being installed, wouldn't need to be used. However, network-manager
36 assumes that, if it is installed, it should attempt to manage the
37 system's network configuration. It attempts to avoid overriding local
38 manual configuration, but it isn't able to detect all cases where the
39 user is using some other component or system to manage networking.
40 The user has to take separate, explicit (and somewhat unusual for the
41 average user) action to disable network-manager after it has been
44 6. The Technical Committee believes that this will cause undesireable
45 behavior for upgrades from squeeze, and (of somewhat lesser
46 importance) will make it more difficult than necessary for GNOME users
47 to swap network management components, something for which there
48 appears to be noticable demand. We therefore believe that
49 network-manager should be moved to Recommends in gnome-core.
51 7. 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 (i) 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 (ii) The package has historically been recommended rather than listed as
60 a dependency, so existing Debian users are used to that behavior.
62 (ii) 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 8. If any of these points did not apply, the situation would be
68 significantly different.
72 9. The Technical Committee overrules the decision of the gnome-core
73 metapackage maintainers. The dependency from gnome-core to
74 network-manager-gnome should be downgraded to Recommends.
76 10. The Technical Committee requests that the Release Managers
77 unblock the update to implement this decision, so that this
78 change may be released in wheezy.