#939070 removing gnome desktop in tasksel has little or no effect

Package:
tasksel
Source:
tasksel
Submitter:
Joey Hess
Date:
2019-10-18 17:21:05 UTC
Severity:
normal
#939070#5
Date:
2019-08-31 19:57:07 UTC
From:
To:
I accidentially installed debian 10.0 with gnome rather than xfce, so
after the installation, I re-ran tasksel, unselected gnome, and selected
xfce.

I then rebooted, and it still booted up to gdm3 and on login it
defaulted to gnome shell.

Tasksel probably removed task-gnome-desktop, but many of its
dependencies appeared to still be installed.

(I've since reinstalled the machine with xfce and so can't provide any
more details about its state.)
#939070#10
Date:
2019-10-16 11:26:36 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Joey,

Yes, removing task-gnome-desktop won't do much if you do not run
`apt autoremove` or somesuch.

Of course, making tasksel run autoremove would be a terrible idea,
since it might remove unrelated packages.

I'm not sure how that can be addressed, TBH.
#939070#15
Date:
2019-10-17 19:23:40 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Nicolas and Joey,

Nicolas Braud-Santoni <nicoo@debian.org> writes:

Agreed.

Maybe this?:

1. use changes their selection of desktop task.
2. tasksel gets a list of recursive dependencies for the task that is
being removed.
3. the task is removed, but tasksel still has work to do...
4. the new desktop task is installed.
5. use a dry run of autoremove to get a list of packages that can be
autoremoved
6. cut anything from the list at #5 that isn't in the list at #2
7. remove autoremovable packages that match the removed task

What are the pitfalls with this method?  Sadly I cannot volunteer for
this work as I don't know Perl.


Cheers,
Nicholas
#939070#20
Date:
2019-10-18 15:05:15 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

Nicholas D Steeves <nsteeves@gmail.com> wrote:

Is it required that tasksel provides such functionality ("removing packages
from system")?
Looking at its package description, it's a
"tool for selecting tasks for installation on Debian systems".

So, deinstalling is out of the scope of this tool IMO.

And I can imagine that deinstallation scenario was never considered when
developing tasksel.

Therefore, this bug should be marked 'wontfix'.


Holger
#939070#25
Date:
2019-10-18 17:15:55 UTC
From:
To:
Yes, the fix does not necessarily belong in tasksel itself.

However, I am not keen to WONTFIX this, as it does point at a general
usability issue in Debian: there is no reasonable way to deal with
uninstalling software pulled in through a task/metapackage.


*Maybe* doing something like uninstalling the package and autoremove only
packages that were made uneeded by that removal would work, but this sounds
like it would need support in apt.  However, this also seems like a much
bigger undertaking than I currently have the energy for.


Best,

  nicoo