I Give Up.

[elfs]

I went back to RedHat. Why?

Because Debian sucked worse than Gentoo. I cannot freakin' believe some of the bizarre "package dependencies" in Debian. I can't uninstall Nautilus without unstalling Gnome. Okay, I understand some people make a religion out of Nautilus, so I might have been able to live with that. But then apt wouldn't let me remove mkisofs without deleting Gnome.

What. The. Fuck, Over?

Mkisofs is a program for converting a directory tree into an image suitable for burning onto a CD. Apparently, it's packaged with cdrecord, which has a Nautilus helper, which cannot be uninstalled without breaking Nautilus, which in turn (so the logic goes) cannot be uninstalled without breaking Gnome. So the entire desktop manager gets ripped out.

It's a freakin' command line program with NO dependencies, Debian's assertion to the contrary. I CAN remove it from Redhat, but not from Debian?

Comments

[funos.livejournal.com]

Very strange. (I've run all three branches of Debian for a while now.)
Having never installed KDE or GNOME, I've never had this problem.
I suspect it's GNOME-specific...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I've run Debian-stable a lot in server environments and been really happy with it, but never as a desktop. Now I know why. And it's not really necessary for this kind of f'dup breakage to exist. Nautilus components are independent; they don't depend on one-another. For that matter, in RedHat 9, the Nautilus executable and the Nautilus libraries are separated items, so tools that need access to the libeel or libmedusa can have them, but you don't need that 20MB executable hovering in memory doing nothing but cluttering up your background.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Even if Nautilus is installed, you don't have to run it.

I agree that Debian's dependencies are whack, though. That's a big part of why I moved to Gentoo. Of course, I don't mind running a fairly maximal system on my machines with local UIs - having software installed which I don't use doesn't bother me. On a smaller system like your laptop, it probably would. I don't know what I'd do with a system like that today - probably use Debian, as before. I can't stand the (lack of) package management on distributions like Red Hat and SuSE.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I've run Debian-stable a lot in server environments and been really happy with it, but never as a desktop. Now I know why. And it's not really necessary for this kind of f'dup breakage to exist. Nautilus components are independent; they don't depend on one-another. For that matter, in RedHat 9, the Nautilus executable and the Nautilus libraries are separated items, so tools that need access to libeel or libmedusa can have them, but you don't need that 20MB executable hovering in memory doing nothing but cluttering up your background.

[solarbird]

dselect blows donkeys. I run into that kind of crap all the time. Its internal state manager maintains a parallel install-state database which is b0rken and also often generates false dependencies. Try using dpkg directly, which uses the actual internal state check system.

[funos.livejournal.com]

I'll second that. It's nice for browsing, but I install using apt-get.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Suggest filing a bug against one or more of the packages... Debian is *supposed* to be good about such things.

Also suggest SUSE instead of Red Hat. RH is headed in the direction of user-surly with respect to support issues at warp one zillion... SUSE/Novell aims to take over the desktop for its own, and thus won't have such issues. We (Celestial) are using SUSE 9.0 PRO with good results.... only complaint I have currently is that YAST2 won't let you unselect kernel-source when doing an online update, and even at T-1 speeds 35MB takes a while.... but once you've got it down, everything Just Works.

I tried that...

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

Filed a bug about nautilus being a 'depends' instead of 'recommends'.

Got an annoyingly sarcastic response from the guy who maintains gnome-core. Here, I'll reproduce part of it:

GNOME meta-packages are not about having what everyone prefers, it's
about having a sensible default. Nautilus is, like it or not, the
default. Most GNOME developers and users will tell you GNOME isn't
really GNOME without Nautilus, it's in fact a major component of this
software collection.

Why don't you suggest that I drop gedit too, as we have vim and emacs;
or gnome-terminal (xterm or rxvt are less resource intensive), or
metacity | sawfish, as windowmaker also works with GNOME? gnome-applets
isn't strictly needed either, none of the applets included in ther are
required to run GNOME. Bug Buddy? You can use mozilla or lynx
directly to file bugs. Eog? Ditch the crap, we've had Gqview for ages!
Yelp isn't required either, most of us don't ever look at the GNOME help
documents anyway... and better not talk about the utility of
gnome-icon-theme.

Am I alone in thinking that if a package is listed in 'depends', it should actually be a dependency?

Feh. Maybe I ought to look at gentoo.

Shalon Wood

Re: I tried that...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, at least you tried. I went back to the latest RedHat, and started over, using the upgrader, and then installing on top of that the Linux 2.4.23-CK kernel (with four patches pulled out of the Gentoo tree), and that worked fine. Then I installed xscreensaver, xmms, gthumb 2.1, and a few other niceties I can't live without. Oh, and I hacked Metacity so it wraps.

Nothing too radical, and it seems to be nice and stable.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Heh, I just had a similar experience with a new install of Xandros (which is debian-based) this weekend. I tried to remove some random little utility, and XN (their gui apt frontend) "helpfully" removed about half of the packages on the system.

Oh well, at least their reinstaller/rescue process works pretty reliably as it turns out.

I'm going to give Xandros a few more weeks of settling-in time, but I fear that this ends, inevitably, with me breaking down and buying RHEL WS.

[(Anonymous)]

i was just about to sugest xandros 2.0 i read an article in eweek that said it is the most compatable linux os for desktop use

[(Anonymous)]

i was just about to sugest xandros 2.0 i read an article in eweek that said it is the most compatable linux os for desktop use

[felis-concolor.livejournal.com]

I love both Debian and Gentoo, and can't stand Red Hat at all, because of the terrible package dependencies. More often than not I've tried to upgrade a package on RH, and had it fail, or had to force things or do things from source. With debian, I have *never* had an issue like that. Yes, there are a lot o fextra things in debian, but the system *works*. I can't say that about Red Hat.

But, to each his own. Choice of Linux distribution is like choice of editors (vi forever!). Pick the one you're most comfortable with.

And here I come, straight out of left field...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...with using purely SlackWare for my desktop system currently.

Oddly, I never have any of these problems I'm hearing here, uninstalling or re-installing anything. Mind you, SlackWare packages tend to come in dead-last for speed of release, but once they're released, they sure seem to puzzle-piece into an existing system quite nicely, and puzzle-piece out decently, prefering to leave cruft behind than break anything, unlike many other package management systems I keep seeing.

Then again, their idea of package management is simplistic, even simpler than .rpm's in many ways, being nothing more than a tarball with a seperate file describing installation for the installer, more or less.

I've definatly run into the oddities mentioned though with Debian-based stuff, and all of the source-based installers, while nice for some things, make some really annoying assumptions. Trying to make a Gnome-only install from Sorcerer/Gentoo/any of the source-based systems never worked right. Even making a KDE-only install didn't work quite right, but actually got to the state of usability before I gave up again.

Then again, generally speaking I just want a window manager that gets out of my way. I use Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc, and the most I want the 'window manager' to provide is a calculator and notepad-equivilant. Spreadsheets, word processing, anything else? No thanks. That's a seperate program for me, much the same way that I'm very happy with Mozilla being broken up into Firebird and Thunderbird seperately now, so I can decline on Tbird since I use PINE for e-mail, etc.

Re: And here I come, straight out of left field...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I used Slackware for a long time, but it's long and slow release cycle discouraged me and I eventually went for something more modern. RedHat is a peculiar mix of very hot kernel technologies and conservative application decisions, but I like the fact that it's sane about most of itss dependencies.

And I like metacity; it's a window manager "for grown ups," as it says in the code. It's not *shudder* enlightenment.

[kyriani.livejournal.com]

I'm a SuSE grrl myself, but I have to admit I've never tried to install (or use) Gentoo. Or deal too much with package dependencies actually. I have both Gnome and KDE up and running on my SuSE 8.2 install.
I've never tried Debian, though I hear my mom likes it. I don't much care for RedHat, but then I was a Slackware distro geek for a long long time and just switched over to SuSE within the last 2 years.

'gnome' is a metapackage

[(Anonymous)]

Gnome is a metapackage: deinstalling the 'gnome' package does *not* deinstall the entirety of gnome, just the metapackage itself.

The gnome metapackage is there for people who just want a standard gnome environment; they 'apt-get install gnome' (or whatever) and the dependencies of the gnome package pull in all the real packages which actually do the grunt work. You can deinstall the gnome package after installing it and you won't notice the difference.

The reason that removing mkisofs results in the gnome metapackge being removed is that gnome depends on gnome-desktop-environment (another meta package) which in turn depends on nautilus-cd-burner, which is a package which actually does do something & depends on mkisofs.

You can have a happy working gnome desktop without ever going near the gnome metapackage. It's not installed on my system at all because I don't need some of the stuff it pulls in: You can install the gnome-core metapackage to get the core gnome stuff withhout the extra cruft.

So there you go: more than you ever wanted to know probably!

cheers, Phil

Re: 'gnome' is a metapackage

[(Anonymous)]

Even when I try to uninstall nautilus, apt-get says this:

apt-get remove nautilus
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
gnome-core nautilus

So the gnome-core does want to get removed

just do it

[(Anonymous)]

there's no matter removing gnome-core!!!!
this is the way i removed nautilus.
+
boiteatrips