Mike Jones wrote: > Is there just no way for a package maintaner to not have extra work > piled on their already hefty load while at the same time we allow a user > of Ubuntu to remove most traces of a program in a package with multiple > programs without having to also remove the rest of them? Is it worth > doing even if its possible? I think I'm in a somewhat unique position of > having extreme distaste whenever my system tells me I can't do something > in a counter intuitive way. You can remove the program and keep the other ones in the package actually - nothing is preventing you to do so, even the system. The cleanest solution would be for you to repackage gnome-games (or whatever name the package is called) for your personal use, while excluding the programs you don't want.
Quite a lot of work for absolutely no gain, but could we expect Ubuntu developers and package maintainers to spend days doing that for us while we wouldn't spend the same amount of time ourselves (including the time googling for howtos and such)? Especially when they already have far more critical bugs to address (like when the programs don't even run, or when people can't install Ubuntu or run it on their machines ;) ). But all in all, nothing is preventing you to do what you want to achieve. Fact is, the way it's done now allows easy upgrades for millions of people who are quite please to see the selection of programs updated for each release, while said programs only take a few kb of space on their drives. And to be fair, when people are complaining they can't remove foo without removing bar or ubuntu-desktop, I always wonder why they point to programs that only takes a few kB of space while being oblivious to the hundreds of MB taken by fonts, translations, libraries, system utilities, drivers... they'd never use in a lifetime, but that are invaluable because they make peripherals, foreign languages documents and other things work out of the box in Linux. For space-constrained drives, there's Damn Small Linux, and if we were shooting for that goal I'm not so sure you'd find so many developers and packagers in Ubuntu. If unused programs are really an issue but you're not so tight on space to use DSL, the Ubuntu server install could probably address your needs better - just chose all the programs that you need one by one, and you'd end up with far less programs than you'd have just trying to get rid of individual programs in multi-program packages that show in the menus. Such a difference it wouldn't be funny. Loïc -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
