Hello maintainers of tasksel, the recent change to make 'xfce4' a 'Recommends' instead of 'Depends' has unexpected side effects: * The package 'cinnamon' get pulled in (which is not xfce) * The default greeter changed from 'lightdm-gtk-greeter' to 'slick-greeter' (as seen on openQA [1][2]) I think that the dependency resolver had a hard time figuring out the best/desired set of packages. I've tried (in a chroot) to uninstall 'cinnamon-core', and that helped a bit in reducing the amount of undesired packages. Also explicitly installing 'lightdm-gtk-greeter' (which is the preferred package in 'lightdm') (and uninstalling 'slick-greeter') made the configuration more XFCE-like. I'll try to find the real cause. Bad: `apt install xfce4 lightdm firefox-esr xfce4-screensaver xfce4-goodies xfce4-power-manager xfce4-terminal mousepad default-dbus-session-bus xsane parole quodlibet atril tango-icon-theme network-manager-applet` Good: `apt install xfce4 lightdm firefox-esr xfce4-screensaver xfce4-goodies xfce4-power-manager xfce4-terminal mousepad default-dbus-session-bus xsane parole quodlibet atril tango-icon-theme` -> network-manager-applet tries to pull in cinnamon If 'xfce-polkit' is mentioned before 'network-manager-applet', this won't happen, and the list of packages looks good. (I guess because 'polkit-1-auth- agent' will then be fulfilled with the package suitable for XFCE) Note that xfce-polkit looks like the suitable package, but I'll provide a MR with 'mate-polkit', because that is a recommends on 'xfce4' (when I know this bug number). With kind regards, Roland Clobus [1] Last good: https://openqa.debian.net/tests/562030, using tasksel 3.89 [2] First bad: https://openqa.debian.net/tests/562126, using tasksel 3.90
Hi Roland, Am 21. August 2026 13:16:14 MESZ schrieb This is really unexpected to me. Do you know, if these (xfce and mate, addressed in your MR) are the only affected cases? Holger
Hi Roland, Am 21. August 2026 13:16:14 MESZ schrieb This is really unexpected to me. Do you know, if these (xfce and mate, addressed in your MR) are the only affected cases? Holger
Hello Holger, Those are the affected cases that I knew of when I wrote the bug report. In openQA you can see the last installations with netinst with tasksel 3.89 [1] followed by the installations with tasksel 3.90 [2]. Since then I've made this full A-B comparison, and I also see issues with LXQt and GNOME. GNOME only has these issues on UEFI secure boot, not on BIOS boot. The effects on the GNOME installation remind me of #1139453, which is probably also an issue with the dependency chain, but I've been unable to reproduce that issue locally. In the 'Logs & Assets' tab of each individual test you can find the installation log (complete_install-DI_syslog.txt), the list of installed packages (sut_packages.txt) and more. In the 'Investigation' tab you can see diffs of some selected files. I can try to find a fix for LXQt and GNOME later, but I think that the MR [3] could already be deployed and published. If XFCE and Mate installations return to normal, we would have a confirmation that this is a suitable strategy. With kind regards, Roland [1] https://openqa.debian.net/tests/overview?distri=debian&version=testing&build=20260816_7 [2] https://openqa.debian.net/tests/overview?distri=debian&version=testing&build=20260817_1 [3] https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/merge_requests/65
Hi again, Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org> wrote (Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:19:59 +0200): this approach is probably a bad idea in general, since it was a main idea behind this, to do this change backward and forward during release cycles in the future? CC'ing Graham, as he initially requested this change. Holger