[LAU] What on earth... resolved

[david]

On 12/22/2013 08:30 AM, Will Godfrey wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:41:07 +0100
> Philipp Гњberbacher <murks at tuxfamily.org> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 21 Dec 2013 22:23:42 +0000
>> Will Godfrey <willgodfrey at musically.me.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> did the debian devs think they were doing?
>>>
>>> My music machine is set up precisely as I want it with no spare fluff
>>> or eye-candy, and fits my workflow like a glove. I seldom make any
>>> changes, but thought it high time I checked for upgraded packages. Up
>>> till now this has never been any kind of problem and usually results
>>> in some tiny overall improvements.
>>>
>>> Today was different. Without asking, indeed, without even a warning,
>>> they installed GDM, Gnome3 and pulse audio, thus rendering my
>>> computer totally useless. The only thing I could do was reboot, then
>>> log into recovery mode, find aptitude and delete the crap.
>>>
>>> I will never really trust debian again :(
>>
>> apt-get upgrade didn't show what it was planning to do? That sounds
>> unlikely, but if it did happen, then something is very wrong in
>> debian-land.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Philipp
>
> This turned out to be a minor cascade of issues.
>
> In the first place I should make the point that I've been using debian
> exclusively since the days of 'sarge'. My installs all follow the same pattern.
> I install just the minimum to get a terminal from which I can then install only
> what I want. I set up an autoloading single user (without admin privs), then
> pull in just enough of X to be able to run openbox and ROX filer, from then on
> I build up the audio system I want with (hopefully) the minimum of extraneous
> crud.
>
> I flagged this up here because it was (at that time) fundamentally my music
> making machine that was borked. As well as hoping for some suggestions as to
> how it happened I wanted to warn fellow musicians of a possible problem.
>
> When I did the upgrade I was somewhat lazy and used synaptic's 'mark all
> upgrades', with just a cursory glance to check that nothing dramatic was going
> to happen.  At some point in time synaptic itself has gained another,
> pre-ticked, check box for enabling 'recommends' to be treated as dependencies.
> Putting a script in the apt directory to stop this action no longer works.
>
> Because GDM got installed, my basic start script was completely bypassed,
> leaving my machine in a totally unfamiliar state. There was no message to say
> that this was going to happen, and no reason for me to suspect that it might.
>
> I have another machine with a fairy similar install so used that to track (and
> block) exactly the sequence of events. One of the benefits of synaptic over
> using apt-get or even aptitude is that you can get it to very clearly display
> just the upgradeable packages, so I did this and one-by-one marked them for
> upgrade, looking for dependencies. Imagine my astonishment when openbox came up
> with an apparent dependency of both gnome-session and KDE-session.
> Gnome-session then had a dependency for GDM and Gnome desktop. To make matters
> worse, this was Gnome3. Gnome desktop has a dependency on pulse audio (spit).
>
> Openbox has absolutely no need for any of this stuff at all.
>
> It was an very fast responding and helpful guy on the openbox list who informed
> me that the debian maintainer had added the Gnome and KDE sessions to the
> openbox package as 'recommends'. Combined with synaptic (unknown to me) having
> the box checked for treating recommends as dependencies, the result was
> inevitable.
>
> I've since been informed that the change to the openbox package falls foul of
> the debian policy document, has been raised on a number of distro lists (but
> not UCOL) and has now been reverted.

Hmm, just checked my Synaptic setups here. The existing ones from 
Aptosid on the desktop and the old laptop don't have recommended 
packages as dependencies. The one on the new laptop (Ubuntu 13.10 just 
updated a few days ago) is set to treat recommended packages as 
dependencies. Thanks for mentioning it, just unchecked it there!

Sneaky little thing for the Synaptic maintainers to do.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com