Dear Maintainer,

    * What led up to the situation?
My primary file manager is Caja (from the MATE desktop) in a OpenBox system. However, some applications insist on opening directories in Nautilus, which I do not use and wish to remove.
When attempting to remove Nautilus, APT proposes to also remove Cairo-Dock because the package cairo-dock-shortcuts-plug-in has a hard dependency on Nautilus.

    * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)?
I tried to remove Nautilus via sudo apt remove nautilus.

APT responded that it would also remove cairo-dock due to dependency issues.

I investigated with apt-cache rdepends nautilus and found that cairo-dock-shortcuts-plug-in directly depends on Nautilus.

    * What was the outcome of this action?
I could not remove Nautilus without also removing Cairo-Dock, which I want to keep.
The dependency chain forces users to either:

Keep Nautilus installed unnecessarily, or

Lose Cairo-Dock functionality.

    * What outcome did you expect instead?
I expected to be able to:

Remove Nautilus safely while keeping Cairo-Dock.

Have cairo-dock-shortcuts-plug-in work with any file manager (via xdg-open) or depend on the file-manager virtual package instead of hard-coding a dependency on Nautilus.

Thank you,