[Fwd: Re: Two rather negative articles about Ubuntu]

[Lee Revell]

On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 20:59 +0200, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 14:41 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> > Yes but is it clearly documented somewhere that the old tried and true
> > method of upgrading for us "os-experts" no longer works?
> 
> The Dapper release notes and upgrade instructions clearly say that if
> you don't use the update-manager, you should make sure that
> ubuntu-desktop is installed before upgrading. IMO that implies not that
> it is impossible to upgrade otherwise, but it does imply that if you
> don't follow the instructions here, that you yourself have to look out
> for undesired package removals.
> 
> 
> > I suspect the oreillynet author is one of these "os-experts" and expects
> > the way they've always upgraded to still be supported.
> 
> I hope an expert would either read the instructions, or at least prevent
> the removal of important packages.
> 

It's too easy now to inadvertently remove ubuntu-desktop because the
dependencies are insane.

I have a perfectly working desktop system and ubuntu-desktop is not
installed.  If I were to install it it would pull in 267 packages and
eat 567MB of diskspace for stuff I don't need at all.

For example:

ttf-arabeyes ttf-arphic-ukai ttf-arphic-uming ttf-baekmuk
ttf-bengali-fonts ttf-devanagari-fonts ttf-gentium ttf-gujarati-fonts
ttf-indic-fonts ttf-kannada-fonts ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-kochi-mincho
ttf-lao ttf-malayalam-fonts ttf-mgopen ttf-oriya-fonts ttf-punjabi-fonts
ttf-tamil-fonts ttf-telugu-fonts ttf-thai-tlwg

Why should I have to install all these fonts?  AFAICT all it would do
for me would be to make spam render correctly.  I can't read any of
those languages, but uninstalling one of those font packages would
remove all of ubuntu-desktop.

Lee