Aptitude wants to remove "ubuntu-desktop"

[Derek Broughton]

Daniel Robitaille wrote:

[please keep the attributions when quoting]

>> > 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).
> 
> If you look at these wiki pages, you will see that install
> ubuntu-dekstop is always one of the first you are suppose to do before
> an upgrade:

I understand that.  It _is_ nevertheless a bad assumption.  We have a great
package management system, and somebody has basically emasculated it by
deciding that we don't need to enforce proper package dependence, we'll
just force everybody to install *-desktop.  It's an abomination, and I'm
not going to swallow it silently!

Besides that, since when did a _wiki_ page become gospel?  Shades of Nature
vs. Brittanica!
-- 
derek