Ars has reviewed GNOME 2.20. "GNOME 2.20 was officially released last week after six months of development. The new version includes strong incremental improvements that contribute to a better user experience and provide more flexibility and integration opportunities for third-party software developers."
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Member since:2005-11-11
Removing Mono wants to remove
- Tomboy (understand this)
- Gnome Applets (because tomboy is one!?..)
- Gnome Panel (because applets sit on it..)
Gnome Applets is almost certainly a metapackage, depending on all the applets. Remove one and the metapackage is removed, but the rest remain. Gnome Panel probably is too (it would be pretty dumb to have it removed otherwise). Likewise, Gnome-Desktop is a metapackage. Its removal means nothing other than that you no longer have every single piece installed (which is what you want, since you wish to be rid of Tomboy).
I see this all the time in Debian with KDE. Someone complains about having multiple multimedia players or multiple text editors. When told to remove the ones they don't want, (s)he says (s)he can't because it "would remove KDE." Yes, the KDE metapackage that draws in all parts including many text editors. If you don't need all of it, you don't need the metapackage.
Similarly, if you don't need all of the Gnome Applets (say, you don't want Tomboy), you don't need the metapackage. That's assuming it is a metapackage, which I don't know for sure since I don't use Gnome and you didn't mention which distro you are using, though I am assuming Ubuntu.
Member since:2005-09-21
While it is technically true that you don't need the metapackage, it is not quite as simple to remove it as you say. The problem is that when you install the equivalent of kde-desktop, it pulls in a bunch of other packages, and marks those packages as having been automatically installed. This is usually a good thing, because when you remove that metapackage you want all the dependencies to be removed as well. Now the problem is when you want to remove one of those packages because you don't need it. The metapackage must be uninstalled because it no longer has all of its dependencies installed. Unfortunately when you uninstall it, it wants to uninstall all the other packages as well. Then you have to manually fix all the packages it wants to uninstall.
It's not hard, but it certainly is disconcerting to see the package manager wanting to uninstall half the system just because you want to uninstall one app.
Member since:
2006-06-22
Yeah it is true its optional but some distros are *bad* at packaging these optional things. For example this happened to me once:
Removing Mono wants to remove
- Tomboy (understand this)
- Gnome Applets (because tomboy is one!?..)
- Gnome Panel (because applets sit on it..)
etc etc and break the gnome desktop as a result. I am not going to name the distro for needless flaming but merely pointing out that it is usually the packagers fault when removing mono breaks the gnome desktop as it works flawlessly on other distros as others have mentioned.
So first place to complain about such problem would be the bug tracker for your distro.