On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:19:35 +0000 Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.med...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all. > > According to documentations, gnome-core package is considered to be > the very minimal gnome installation in Debian. But in my personal > experience it is not so. Just after installing Debian, I installed > gnome-core just to have the minimal gnome installation. Then I > noticed that totem, the video player, was also installed even though > I hadn't. Since I use mplayer, I did `aptitude purge totem' and was > surprised to see that gnome-core depended on totem, so that removing > totem would also remove gnome-core. I did so, and now gnome desktop > environment, even without gnome-core package, seems to work well. So > I ask to myself what gnome minimal install should really be. I have > Sid. > I think the answer to that depends on how long your piece of string is. What do you mean by 'gnome'? The bit you see is gnome-shell, which depends on themes and backgrounds and a large number of libraries. But gnome, the desktop environment, also contains a recommended file manager, image viewer, sound and vision player, and so on. All of these are integrated better than the non-gnome equivalents. Are they part of a minimal gnome? Your call. The gnome-core which you have removed is a metapackage i.e. it contains no code but exists to bring in the set of components which the gnome developers consider to be a minimal gnome. Once installed, along with the dependencies, it is redundant and can be removed without affecting anything current. But an auto-remove will now see the dependencies of gnome-core as not having been manually installed nor being needed, so you had better not use that facility in future. Also, if the gnome architecture changes in future, without gnome-core being present to be upgraded, your system will not bring in any new dependent components. But you have already differed from the gnome developers in the matter of totem, and there may be other dependencies of gnome-core which you wish to remove. I left gnome behind when it went to version 3, but there are still a few gnome components I use, and I have just installed them individually. Therefore I don't have gnome-core or many other components. You can take this approach: don't install gnome at all, just the components you want, and they will bring only their required dependencies. I suspect gnome-shell will bring in a very large number, but not including totem and perhaps others you don't need. The disadvantage of this approach is that for maybe a year you will look for something and not find it, and need to install it individually. Taking the core metapackage means that most of what you're likely to need will already be present. Hard drives are sized for Windows (at least a 50GB installation these days), and any drive you have bought in the last few years will be large enough that a couple of gigabytes of rarely-used stuff will not be an inconvenience. There is also the philosophy that you can't have too many image viewers or sound and video players or web browsers. Two days ago I found an audio file which vlc (my default player) wouldn't play, nor would mplayer, but kaffeine would. I don't actually have totem installed, I recall a significant disagreement with it a year or two ago, which is probably no longer relevant, but I haven't reinstalled it. I might when I find a file that neither vlc, mplayer nor kaffeine will play... -- Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150412202057.036ab...@jresid.jretrading.com
