Newby help: Changing to Thunderbird instead of Eveloution

[James Gray]

On 25/10/2008, at 9:36 AM, tux wrote:

> The last time I uninstalled Evolution I saw Synaptic was going to
> uninstall the Ubuntu desktop even though I had not checked it. How  
> do I
> uninstall Evolution and not uninstall my desktop?

"Ubuntu desktop" is a meta-package that depends on a whole heap of  
programs; one of which is evolution.  When you uninstall evolution, it  
will remove the metapackage too (due to it's dependance on evolution)  
however the rest of the packages that the the metapackage depend on  
will be left intact :)

$apt-cache show ubuntu-desktop
Package: ubuntu-desktop
Priority: optional
Section: metapackages
...

Have a look at all the dependancies ;)  The metapackage exists to  
provide a simple way the group a large number of packages for  
installation. Have a look at "build-essential" for another example.   
The key thing to remember with metapackages is that when you remove  
one of their dependant, the metapackage is also removed to resolve the  
dependancy requirement, but this DOESN'T cause all the other dependent  
packages to be removed too :)

Cheers,

James


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