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; specifically, there is no
19 longer any way to install any but the most minimal GNOME metapackage
20 (gnome-session) without installing network-manager, and users who have
21 gnome or gnome-core installed but have removed or never installed
22 network-manager will have network-manager installed during an upgrade
25 4. For most applications and components, the only drawback of this would
26 be some additional disk space usage, since the application, despite
27 being installed, wouldn't need to be used. However, network-manager
28 assumes that, if it is installed, it should attempt to manage the
29 system's network configuration. It attempts to avoid overriding local
30 manual configuration, but it isn't able to detect all cases where the
31 user is using some other component or system to manage networking.
32 The user has to take separate, explicit (and somewhat unusual for the
33 average user) action to disable network-manager after it has been
36 5. The Technical Committee believes that this will cause undesireable
37 behavior for upgrades from squeeze, and (of somewhat lesser
38 importance) will make it more difficult than necessary for GNOME users
39 to swap network management components, something for which there
40 appears to be noticable demand. We therefore believe that
41 network-manager should be moved to Recommends in gnome-core.
43 6. Please note that this is not a general statement about GNOME
44 components. It is very specific to network-manager because all of the
47 (i) The package takes action automatically because it is installed,
48 rather than being a component that can either be run or not at the
51 (ii) The package has historically been recommended rather than listed
52 as a dependency, so existing Debian users are used to that
53 behavior and will expect it to be preserved during upgrades.
55 (ii) There is both demonstrable, intentional widespread replacement of
56 that package by Debian GNOME users and no significant loss of
57 unrelated GNOME desktop functionality by replacing it with a
60 If any of these points did not apply, the situation would be
61 significantly different.
65 7. The Technical Committee overrules the decision of the gnome-core
66 metapackage maintainers. The dependency from gnome-core to
67 network-manager-gnome should be downgraded to Recommends.
69 8. The Technical Committee requests that the Release Managers unblock
70 the update to implement this decision, so that this change may be