Musing on Ubuntu and Dependencies

[techieMoe]

This weekend I wanted to do some house cleaning (both in the literal sense and on my computer) so I went about removing programs and daemons I never use. I do not print from my laptop so I wanted to remove CUPS and all the Hewlett-Packard printer drivers from the system. I also never use fat email clients so I wanted to remove Evolution.

If any of you fellow Ubuntu users out there are chuckling to yourself right now, you know where this is going. I removed everything I could that didn't tell me it wanted to remove my entire OS in the process. That left me with a few random CUPS libraries and a could of personal information manager packages I couldn't remove without hosing my Gnome setup.

I would have liked to also remove a few of the Gnome games I don't play, but apparently in order to remove GTali I also would have to go without Gnome Mahjongg or AisleRiot Solitaire, which just wouldn't work for me, so I settled for removing them from my Games menu instead. Out of sight, out of mind.

After removing Evolution, CUPS, and a few drivers I rebooted and was greeted by an error saying that the Gnome Settings Daemon couldn't start. My desktop was set to the default (ugly) Gnome look and feel, and I couldn't run the Appearance control panel. Compiz was also disabled.

When removing Evolution I was warned that it would remove the meta-package "ubuntu-desktop". I was assured through my Google searches that this package would do no harm if removed, so I didn't worry about it. However apparently some of the other packages I removed along with Evolution caused issues with Gnome.

I reinstalled the "ubuntu-desktop" metapackage and haven't had the issue since. Unfortunately that also means I've reinstalled several things I do not and will never use: Evolution, CUPS, and Bluetooth support. I know someone on the forum recently expressed frustration with these Gnome inter-dependencies. Does anyone have suggestions on how I can proceed?

[valan]

I forget the commands, you'll have to look up the man page, but there should be a way to remove the package without removing the things that supposedly depend on it. I always have these troubles with distros, the package dependencies make no sense when you get down into the finer details. As a possible future solution, I reccomend LFS. Retarded package dependencies are a thing of the past.

[Dapper Dan]

Does anyone have suggestions on how I can proceed?

Probably not the "remedy" you're looking for, and I don't know if you've reviewed it, but Kubuntu is pretty slamming in my book. I've always preferred the Gnome look over KDE and have championed the Gnome desktop over KDE when those type threads come around. But in recent times, I've grown increasingly disappointed with Gnome for several reasons, (you've named some of them here), and have gone back to preferring KDE. I still use Ubuntu some at home, but I have Kubuntu on my secretary's computer and it's just a joy.

[stinkoman]

not that i know anything, but can you go and delete the individual files? (you know you dont need to sleep for a night when you go through EVERY file...)
or of course you could delete 1 file per day that you dont depend on, you know like search what depends on file X if you dont need it delete it. tomorrow youll do file y. but whats this file y has stuff you like depending on it? lets go to file z quickly! but i was only ever on gnome for 10 minutes. so i dont know if i could even begin to persuade you to kde.

[techieMoe]

Probably not the "remedy" you're looking for, and I don't know if you've reviewed it, but Kubuntu is pretty slamming in my book. I've always preferred the Gnome look over KDE and have championed the Gnome desktop over KDE when those type threads come around. But in recent times, I've grown increasingly disappointed with Gnome for several reasons, (you've named some of them here), and have gone back to preferring KDE. I still use Ubuntu some at home, but I have Kubuntu on my secretary's computer and it's just a joy.

I remember looking at Kubuntu a while back but I haven't played with it recently. It may warrant another look.

::EDIT:: Well, I downloaded Kubuntu 7.10 and installed it in a virtual machine just to see. I tried to remove all instances of cups and it removed half the OS, just like regular Ubuntu. What makes Kubuntu worse is that it didn't even warn me that it was planning on removing all of them. It just let me select full removal and went on its merry way deleting the operating system. This is highly annoying.

[techieMoe]

I forget the commands, you'll have to look up the man page, but there should be a way to remove the package without removing the things that supposedly depend on it. I always have these troubles with distros, the package dependencies make no sense when you get down into the finer details. As a possible future solution, I reccomend LFS. Retarded package dependencies are a thing of the past.

I don't quite have the strength (or the time) for LFS at the moment. I'm pretty sure there is a way to remove packages and ignore their dependencies... at least there was in RPM-based distros. I may have to look more into that.

::EDIT:: I'm downloading the LFS live CD. The book claims that with that you don't need an internet connection to get the system running. I intend to test that theory. I must admit, reading through the first couple of chapters of LFS gives me a bit of geeky excitement.

[gruven]

Now you can understand part of the reason why people use Gentoo. Use flags filter out a lot of that stuff, and don't remove half of the OS in order to do it.

I hear Arch is a lot like Gentoo, just in binary form. Plain Debian is also nice.

[MikeTbob]

::EDIT:: I'm downloading the LFS live CD. The book claims that with that you don't need an internet connection to get the system running. I intend to test that theory. I must admit, reading through the first couple of chapters of LFS gives me a bit of geeky excitement.

I do believe techieMoe just got a Woody!

[stinkoman]

I do believe techieMoe just got a Woody!

well in all fairness it was quite... arousing... like electrons in chemistry.

[devils casper]

I prefer Debian netinstall to eliminate unwanted packages. It installs minimal base system and one can install selective packages in it easily.