Recommend instead of depend on gnome-software-plugin-snap?

[Jeremy Bícha]

When I packaged gnome-software 3.22 for Ubuntu, I had it depend on gnome-software-plugin-snap because it should be installed by default in Ubuntu, right?

gnome-software 3.24 now has separate appstream metadata for the various gnome-software plugins. This allows users to easily enable or disable addons by clicking the checkbox on the details page for an app. What's interesting to me is that the Addons don't show up on the Details page if they are provided in the same package as the app itself.

Today, I moved the appstream metadata for the Snap and Flatpak addons to their plugin packages. One benefit is it now very easy for someone to enable Flatpak support.

There's one problem right now. If a user unclicks the checkbox next to "Snappy Support", gnome-software will be uninstalled since it Depends on the Snap plugin.

We could:
1) Change Depends: gnome-software-plugin-snap to Recommends: gnome-software-plugin-snap, or
2) Move the Snap addon metadata back to the gnome-software package so that it Snap support is not removable in gnome-software

Any objection to #1?

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

It should be recommends and ubuntu-desktop should depend on gnome-software-plugin-snap.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

Or every a suggests like the other plugins.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

If we do #1, ubuntu-desktop can only recommend (not depend on) gnome-software-plugin-snap, because we don't want a user to unknowingly uninstall ubuntu-desktop because they unchecked a box.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

I've made ubuntu-desktop recommend the plugin.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-software - 3.24.3-0ubuntu1

---------------
gnome-software (3.24.3-0ubuntu1) artful; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release (LP: #1690654)
  * Recommend instead of depend on gnome-software-plugin-snap (LP: #1691620)
  * Add basic apport hook to report which GNOME Software plugins are
    installed
  * Update patches from wip/ubuntu-3-24 branch

 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Wed, 17 May 2017 23:17:38 -0400