On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 20:12:20 Josh Triplett wrote: > Steve Langasek wrote: > >On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 09:13:52PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > >> So unless the TC wants to remove a great number of packages from the > >> archive, you need to take into account the fact that some voluntary > >> manpower is required to implement your decision. > > > > I think the current Debian GNOME team has a not-undeserved reputation for > > being obstructionist with respect to bugfixes that require divergence from > > upstream's stated direction. If the team demonstrated they were open to > > contributions of the kind you described, volunteers to do the work would > > not be hard to come by. > > That's an impressively high amount of doublespeak packed into a single > paragraph, particularly the words "bugfixes", "volunteers", and > "contributions". At a minimum, I think you're overstating the situation > by refusing to acknowledge that the GNOME team does not consider the > changes forced upon them to be "bugfixes".
Responding specifically to this: > You (and other members of the TC) disliked GNOME's requirement of > NetworkManager, for reasons I still have yet to see explained coherently > anywhere. You forced the GNOME team to remove it. I certainly hope > you find "volunteers" willing to do that kind of work increasingly hard > to come by. Re: dependency removal -- sort of. The reasoning is explained for the most part in the tech-ctte decision for #681834. [1] But just to fully make this clear I'll also provide a brief summary of what I think happened at the time. network-manager conflicted with wicd; when both were installed and active, neither worked -- neither could detect this situation, and the resulting error output was not meaningful. (wicd: "Connection failed: bad password", N-M: "NetowrkManager is not running. Please start it.") Furthermore the documentation that came with network-manager did not in any way explain that this could happen nor what to do about it, nor was there a Breaks: on the package related to wicd to avoid the conflict. By making network-manager a requirement via a dependency, anybody that previously had wicd installed would have their system broken, nor given any clue how to fix it. There was a strong emphasis from GNOME maintainers that N-M integrates with GNOME but that alternatives such as wicd do not and thus a strong desire to have N-M installed; however GNOME does function with Wicd even if there are certain features that don't work due to lack of integration, and there were a known number of installation configurations (> 1000) where users of Squeeze had both wicd and gnome installed. The maintainer of network-manager discussed that the user could leave network-manager installed but disable it via running "update-rc.d network-manager disable" as root -- there was an idea to include this information within the package's README.Debian file, but that didn't happen. In #681834 the decision was to revert the Depends: on network-manager-gnome in gnome-core. However 10 days later a new dependency was added for network-manager-gnome within the gnome metapackage, causing a similar network-manager dependency another way, thus having to go through the discussion again in #688772. There was some discussion concerning N-M as to whether it was possible to detect wicd and avoid conflicts with it, but to my knowledge that was not completed. Near the end of the discussion (which had mostly stopped) I sent a patch for the Debian Release Notes to try to explain this situation for users, resulting in [2], which IMHO is not adequate by itself for mitigating this situation. Discussion fully stopped, and after some time the tech-ctte bug was closed. If you're feeling ire for the tech-ctte but have not yet read their decisions, I would suggest doing so and considering them. [1]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=681834#273 [2]: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#network-manager-conflicts -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/3068331.gcSIP34SPN@trelane
