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