Newby help: Changing to Thunderbird instead of Eveloution

[tux]

Thanks for the reply but most of that was "Greek" to a newby.
On Sat, 2008-10-25 at 09:53 +1100, James Gray wrote:
> 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
> 
>