681834 start on my version of Russ's proposal

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+    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.
+
+    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.
+
+    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 is, so far
+    as the Technical Committee understands, driven primarily by user
+    confusion and bug reports, but does not reflect a deeper or tighter
+    integration of network-manager into GNOME than was the case in
+    squeeze.
+
+    If matters are left as they currently stand, users who have the gnome
+    metapackages installed but do not have network-manager installed will,
+    in the process of upgrading from squeeze to wheezy (either due to an
+    explicit decision to remove it or an implicit decision to not install
+    it by disabling automatic installation of Recommends), 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.
+
+    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.
+
+    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 either moved to Recommends in gnome-core, or
+    moved from the gnome-core metapackage to the gnome metapackage (which
+    is defined as including additional, optional components).
+
+    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:
+
+    1. 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.
+
+    2. The package has historically been recommended rather than listed as
+       a dependency, so existing Debian users are used to that behavior.
+
+    3. 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.
+
+    If any of these points did not apply, the situation would be
+    significantly different.