Hope Gnote replaces Tomboy [LWN.net]

Hope Gnote replaces Tomboy

Posted Sep 24, 2009 1:43 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
Parent article: Celebrating the release of GNOME 2.28

"Tomboy Online is also scheduled for GNOME 2.30"

I hope this changes before 2.30 is actually released. Debian currently has Tomboy, and thus Mono, as a dependency of GNOME (I did a Debian install recently). This is a bad decision on Debian's part, but I guess they looked into removing it but found the depth of Tomboy's integration into GNOME to be such that removing it would be quite a bit of work.

The existence of Mono is great, but it has to be distributed in a way such that it could be painlessly removed from every distribution the day MS starts spreading patent FUD, or pressured royalty demands, or litigation. That would keep us out of danger, and it would also discourage MS from every doing those things since it would know the result would simply be the end of Mono usage.

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Hope Gnote replaces Tomboy

Posted Sep 24, 2009 2:20 UTC (Thu) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link] (3 responses)

> Debian currently has Tomboy, and thus Mono, as a dependency of GNOME

Technically true, but misleading. Tomboy is a dependency of the "gnome" metapackage, yes. But the "gnome" metapackage is just the metapackage for all gnome-related projects, so certainly should have Tomboy. The default Gnome Desktop install is the "gnome-desktop" metapackage, which does not contain either Tomboy nor mono.

> I guess they looked into removing it but found the depth of Tomboy's integration into GNOME to be such that removing it would be quite a bit of work.

What integration? Removing Tomboy from gnome takes all of 10 seconds and one "apt-get remove tomboy", and removes only tomboy -- "apt-cache rdepends tomboy" lists nothing that depend on tomboy whatsoever. (That's on Ubuntu, I doubt it's different on Debian proper).

> The existence of Mono is great, but it has to be distributed in a way such that it could be painlessly removed from every distribution the day MS starts spreading patent FUD

Removing mono altogether ("apt-get purge mono") takes not that much longer than removing Tomboy; and removes, apart from the mono libraries, only tomboy and f-spot (and gnome-do and bless for me, but they're not gnome projects). So, with respect, I'm not certain MS is the only one spreading FUD here.

Hope Gnote replaces Tomboy

Posted Sep 24, 2009 2:32 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (2 responses)

Aha, thanks for the clarification about package names.

My recent experience was that I asked apt-get to "remove tomboy" and it said it would also "remove gnome" - no indication that this didn't require removing GNOME.

Hope Gnote replaces Tomboy

Posted Sep 24, 2009 11:46 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (1 responses)

If you installed the metapackage "gnome" using aptitude, then all of its
dependencies would be marked as having been automatically installed.
Whenever you remove a package using aptitude, it will check the
dependencies of that package. If a) they are marked as having been
automatically installed, and b) no other installed package also depends on
it, then they will also be removed.

Thus, if you have not otherwise indicate you desire the dependencies of the
"gnome" metapackage (you can toggle automatic-status within aptitude on a
per-package basis, or just manually mark one or more of the dependencies
for installation) and the gnome metapackage's dependencies are no longer
being fulfilled (because you've tried to remove tomboy, or whatever), the
rest will go as well.

This is potentially confusing for people who type "aptitude install gnome"
and subsequently remove a dependency; however, I don't think in practise
this can be that many people. Most people will obtain GNOME by default when
they install Debian and select "desktop environment". This method does not
install the "gnome" metapackage (nor tomboy).

I understand that newer versions of apt itself also have this automatic-
dependency tracking, but I don't think the one in Debian stable does.

Hope Gnote replaces Tomboy

Posted Sep 24, 2009 13:06 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

gnome depends on (among others)

tomboy | gnote

That is: either of them will satisfy the dependency, but tomboy is the default if both are reasonable candidates.

So: install gnote and then remove tomboy. Something along the lines of:

aptitude install gnote tomboy_