On Thu,20.May.10, 15:13:35, James Zuelow wrote: > In Thomas' defense, I noticed the same thing and had much the same reaction. > > The Squeeze KDE 4.4 update this week pulled down network-manager as a > dependency. In my case I much prefer wicd to handle my wireless.
$ aptitude search '?depends(network-manager-kde)'
p plasma-widget-networkmanagement-dbg -
debugging symbols for KDE Network Management
Do you have this package installed?
> The update had them both running simultaneously, which I didn't like
> at all. I was plugged into my wired network, which wicd had set up as
> default, and network-manger connected to one of the wireless networks
> I had configured. Both interfaces up, even two default routes. Yuk.
>
> I didn't like the fact that the KDE update ignored my current install
> of wicd to install network-manager, and when I purged network-manager
> KDE worked (and continues to work) just fine.
wicd used to conflict with network-manager, but not anymore:
wicd (1.6.2.2-2) unstable; urgency=low
[...]
* debian/control:
- remove Conflict on network-manager, since both can be used at
the same time, provided they don't try to control the same
interface (Closes: #548978)
There may be valid use cases for this.
> So the "dependency" on network-manager seems to be merely a preference
> of the KDE team. To me that means I should not have seen
> network-manager if I already had wicd installed. This is very similar
> to the various packages that insist they need avahi-daemon to work,
> and yet purging avahi-daemon doesn't break anything not using mDNS.
You could file a whishlist bug on these:
$ aptitude search '?recommends(network-manager-kde)'
p education-standalone - Debian
Edu standalone workstation packages
p kde-standard - the
KDE Plasma Desktop and standard set of applications
p knm-runtime - KDE
NetworkManagement infrastructure runtime files
p network-manager -
network management framework daemon
so they
Recommend: network-manager-kde | wicd-gtk
Unfortunately there is no wicd-qt package and I doubt the KDE
maintainers will want to 'Recommend' a GTK package, especially since it
isn't that hard to override.
> So while Thomas could file a bug, I don't think it's not germane to
> complain about DDs putting everything under the sun into a dependency
> list. Here's the place for the community to decide whether we really
> need to force an install of network-manager (or avahi) when they're
> not really needed, or decide that because some cases might require it
> everyone should have it.
I agree with you, but in this particular case it is not a 'Depends' it
is a 'Recommends', and testing/unstable users should know how to
override those.
Regards,
Andrei
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