Op 23-05-2022 om 13:00 schreef Fabio Fantoni:
Il 23/05/2022 01:42, Glauber Baldez ha scritto:
Some considerations for project improvement:
1. Debian should already offer users a minimal installation mode
similar to Ubuntu, without media players, games and office applications.
2. Debian should follow Doug Gwyn's words in stating that Unix was not
designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would
also stop them from doing smart things; the operating system must
trust the user. Writing this, a big problem is not knowing how to
differentiate the desktop environment from desktop applications,
treating these factors as if they were the same thing. For example,
the user cannot be prevented from removing the default web browser
(desktop application) to replace it with another one of their choice
as this breaks the desktop environment. Where's the freedom? I repeat
again: desktop environment and desktop applications are not the same
thing, so they shouldn't be treated as such either.
Hi, thanks for your mail with suggestion to improve the project.
I'm one maintainer of the cinnamon team, in the years I did some changes
to make possible to have minimal installation of cinnamon. cinnamon (the
package) without recommends is the very minimal. In some cases users had
reported changes that had added unnecessary packages to the dependencies
that I had then modified or removed and made some tests both on debian
and ubuntu but unfortunately I can not do them often because they take a
long time (both installation and quick functional tests) so report or
advice from users are always useful.
cinnamon-core and cinnamon-desktop-environment are 2 metapackage, the
first for minimal desktop environment and second full. In the full one
there are browser, media player and mail client are depends (libreoffice
instead is already in recommends), one users recently required to remove
browser and media player from depends but I added some alternative
instead (in 5.2.2) thinking that are "essential software" for a full DE
metapackage without recommends.
I was wrong and I should move them to the recommends? Any
reply/suggestion from other maintainers or users is appreciated. Sorry
for my bad english.
In my opinion it would be better to use recommends.
I like to use a mail client myself, but many people want to use webmail
these days for example. And many people don't use an IM client.
Some people like to install a browser from outside Debian, like "Brave
Browser" or a flatpack with the latest Firefox.
Such a meta-package is good to install many packages at once, but it
would be nice to have the possibility to remove them individually.
I support many people with Debian, what I often see is that they remove
a package, and then also the meta-package is removed. And later all
dependencies of the meta-package are removed by accident.
Just my 2 cents...
With regards,
Paul
--
Paul van der Vlis Linux systeembeheer Groningen
https://vandervlis.nl
