Am 22.12.2013 04:48, schrieb david:

On 12/21/2013 01:41 PM, Philipp Überbacher wrote:

On Sat, 21 Dec 2013 22:23:42 +0000
Will Godfrey <willgodfrey@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.

Hmmm, haven't had Debian do that to me. A DIST-UPGRADE might have messed things up, but not a straight upgrade. A straight upgrade doesn't install things you don't already have installed unless (I think) they're a dependency of something else you already have installed. IOW, you already had something on there that involved GDM, Gnome3 or PulseAudio.

Funny, I did a full dist-upgrade on my debian-sid box yesterday, which remove GDM. But indeed, apt-get informs me before about any new package, as well about any package it wish to remove.
So I switch to lightdm before the dist-upgrade.
By the way, you should be careful with a "straight upgrade" on debian sid, better do a DIST-UPGRADE, because, for example, library’s could come in new, non-compatible versions, which make it necessary to remove older versions before they get replaced with newer ones (with changed names). When you only do "straight upgrade", you will end up sooner or later in a unstable system state.