Package: lxqt Version: 15 The upgrade of lxqt today caused the forced installation of connman (via 'cmst'), which then broke both my LAN and my PPPOE ADSL connection (including my phone service, which is VOIP only) by taking down all network interfaces and leaving them in an unconfigured state - despite my /etc/network/interfaces file defining my network interfaces exactly as I want them to be.
It also trashed my carefully crafted /etc/resolv.conf (replacing it with a symlink into /run/connman/), and because my LAN was broken, several machines and VMs hung due to NFS failures. I thought it was just an outage at my ISP at first, but more weird networking problems happened, and more of my machines started to hang and even dns lookups of local hosts were timing out...causing me to look at resolv.conf and notice that a) it had been replaced with a symlink and b) connman had been installed. (BTW, I don't even use eth0 or eth1 directly. I have bridges br0 and br1 on them for use with docker and kvm and other things) There is no reason why lxqt (or any WM or DE) should ever depend on connman or network-manager. Recommends or Suggests is more than enough. In fact, there seems to be a lot of unneccessary and problematic Depends: in the lxqt package that should be Recommends: Depends: cmst | network-manager-gnome, lximage-qt, lxqt-core (= 15), lxqt-about, lxqt-admin, lxqt-openssh-askpass, lxqt-powermanagement, lxqt-sudo | gksu, pavucontrol-qt | pavucontrol, qlipper, qps, qterminal, sddm-theme-debian-maui | sddm-theme | lightdm | gdm3 | lxdm | slim | nodm, xarchiver | ark | engrampa There's no reason why lxqt should depend on a display manager. it's usable with just startx. Dependencies on 'sddm-theme-debian-maui | sddm-theme | lightdm | gdm3 | lxdm | slim | nodm' should be replaced with "Recommends: x-display-manager" or similar. GUI archive tools like 'xarchiver | ark | engrampa' can be useful, but there's no justification for making lxqt depend on them. Fortunately, installing them shouldn't cause any harm, but does take away people's ability to choose. pavucontrol* should also be Recommends: - not everyone uses pulse audio, and installing those packages and all their dependencies could break someone's alsa config. Depends are for things that a package can't do without. Recommends are for things that are very useful - or "recommended". Suggests are for things that are merely nice extras. I run sid, so i'm not unfamiliar with the occasional upgrade-related problem - bugs or version incompatibilities or whatever....but it should be possible for me, or anyone else, to run 'apt-get dist-upgrade' without having someone else's **personal preferences** break their system and their network. Some packages (like archiving tools) are relatively harmless, but others (like connman, network-manager, resolvconf) that mess with people's existing config files, some with very complex hand-crafted configurations, will always be dangerous and should never be forced on people. craig PS: I'm aware that debian's default behaviour is to treat Recommends the same as Depends. I'm also aware that it's trivially easy to change that, which is why all my machines have 'APT { Install-Recommends "False";};' in /etc/apt/apt.conf - that allows convenience for novices without removing choice from those who want it. Using Depends rather than Recommends undermines that. -- craig sanders <c...@taz.net.au>