Aptitude wants to remove "ubuntu-desktop"

[Derek Broughton]

Daniel Robitaille wrote:

> On 4/15/06, Matthew R. Dempsky <mrd at alkemio.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 01:00:20PM +0530, Masatran (Deepak), R. wrote:
>> > I guess "ubuntu-desktop" is an improtant package.
>>
>> It's not really important---it's just a convenience package to depend on
>> all of the standard components of an ``Ubuntu desktop.''
>>
>> Uninstalling it should not damage your system.
> 
> the important point to remember is that if you remove it and you ever
> upgrade your system to a newer version of Ubuntu  (Breezy to Dapper
> for example),  you should reinstall it before the upgrade.  If you
> don't, things will most probably break on you since an upgrade between
> Ubuntu versions always assume that this metapackage exist and is
> installed on your system.

That's a very weak assumption.  The package system is supposed to prevent
the need for this sort of thing.  I don't want half of what's in the
*-desktop packages, and I'm going to really resent it if anything else
breaks when I next upgrade to a new version (fwiw, I don't think _anything_
broke when I upgraded from breezy to dapper - and I'd long since removed
kubuntu-desktop).
-- 
derek