Don't have gnome-control-center require network-manager-gnome

[Michael Firth]

Impact
------
Some people want to run a GNOME system without network-manager. Although I believe that's not really officially supported by Canonical/Ubuntu, we don't need to make things more difficult than needed for people that want to try that.

Therefore, we're dropping the Depends to a Recommends which aligns us better with Debian since the major bug requiring it to be a Depends seems to be fixed now.

Test Case
----------
Install the updates
Uninstall network-manager-gnome.
Ensure that ubuntu-desktop and gnome-control-center are still installed.

Regression Potential
--------------------
The Wi-Fi and Network panels probably will not work if NetworkManager is not installed and running.

Original Bug Report
-------------------
The version of gnome-control-center in Ubuntu 18.04 now has a hard dependency on network-manager-gnome.

This didn't used to be the case (in Ubuntu 16.04), and isn't the case for the Debian version of basically the same package (gnome-control-center_3.28.1-1_*.deb) - https://packages.debian.org/buster/gnome-control-center

As there are many cases where network manager does more harm than good to a Linux PC, not being able to change any Gnome settings if you remove network manager seems a bit unfair.

Is there a good reason why this is a hard dependency in the Ubuntu 18.04 version of this package?

Required information:
1) The release of Ubuntu you are using:
Description: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Release: 18.04
2) The version of the package you are using:
gnome-control-center_3.28.1-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and help make Ubuntu better.

I changed the recommends to depends in https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-control-center/1:3.22.1-1ubuntu2 which points to https://bugs.debian.org/845021 with more details about why the change was needed.

But it looks like the dependency is no longer required for at least basic functionality.

[Michael Firth (firthmj)]

Thanks for accepting this as an issue!

I'm not sure where in the distribution chain a change would be have to be made, but surely the WiFi and Network parts could hide themselves if network-manager isn't present, rather than displaying an error?

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I haven't tried running gnome-control-center lately without NetworkManager running (and I'm not very interested in doing it now :) ).

GNOME is probably not interested at all in the usability of gnome-control-center without NetworkManager. On the other hand, there is a 3.30 proposal to hide panels if the hardware isn't present so maybe at least Wi-Fi would be hidden.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-control-center - 1:3.28.1-0ubuntu2

---------------
gnome-control-center (1:3.28.1-0ubuntu2) cosmic; urgency=medium

  * Rename ubuntu-gnome-version.patch to distro-logo.patch for proposed
    upstreaming to Debian. Drop the hardcoded use of the Ubuntu font.
    (LP: #1770473)
  * debian/control.in:
    - Drop now unnecessary fonts-ubuntu dependency
    - Don't recommend libnss-myhostname since systemd-resolved handles this
      functionality (LP: #1766575)
    - Demote network-manager-gnome dependency back to recommends
      (LP: #1770673)
    - Depend on system-config-printer instead of system-config-printer-common
      for the Additional Printer Settings button (LP: #1770695)
  * Add 0007-fix-open-last-page.patch:
    - Proposed patch fixes the "open last opened page" feature for Devices and
      Details pages (LP: #1770699)

 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Fri, 11 May 2018 12:59:17 -0400

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

It's minor and doesn't need to be actively targetted and didn't move since mai, wontfixing for now for bionic but feel free to upload/change the status if you are still interested