gnome-software does not report installing a desktop environment as a dependency

[Alberto Salvia Novella]

The average user cannot tell when they are installing a desktop environment as a dependency of a package.

Having various desktop environments can reduce system performance sensibly, as processes from various desktops are running simultaneously in the background. Moreover the autoremove tool cannot always identify the dependencies when removing some of those installed packages.

For example if I install the "cortina" package, it takes with it the GNOME Display Manager and plenty of wallpapers. Then if I uninstall it and do "sudo apt-get autoremove" those packages are not detected as unused.

Another example: if I install the "rkward" package plenty of KDE services, like the Akonadi indexing service, are installed. Then launching applications in my Inter Core 2 Quad becomes noticeably slower, because my system is running both GNOME and KDE services simultaneously.

If I remove rkward and then I perform an autoremove, the system still stays slow. If I uninstall all the packages in the universe repository, perform an autoremove, and then reinstall the applications I had, the system becomes fast again.

The user shall know these potential problems beforehand.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: apt 1.0.10.2ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.2.0-22.27-generic 4.2.6
Uname: Linux 4.2.0-22-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.19.1-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Sun Dec 20 18:54:54 2015
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-11-14 (36 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" - Release amd64 (20151021)
SourcePackage: apt
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

Snappy developers, please check if this bug affects Snappy too.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

This is not a bug in APT. Please do not go mass bug filing stupid bugs everywhere. Thank you.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

The same applies for the aptitude people.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

gnome-software will show if a package integrates with your desktop environment in a future release.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Like APT, synaptic shows the packages to be installed; as such the user sees that a lot of packages are installed and can make a descision. If the user cannot make a decision based on that fact, said user is not the target audience.

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

After speaking with some Ubuntu developers, I realized that the bug is not in the package management but rather in the autoremove tool. It seems that it keeps recommended packages, even when the ones that installed them as dependency are no longer there.

[Mathew Hodson (mhodson)]

Comment #5 indicated that gnome-software might be able to help by showing more information.

There is a similar upstream bug that talks about related problems. The displayed size doesn't take into account all the dependencies that need to be pulled in, which can be very large, and when an application is removed all the dependencies that were pulled in are not automatically uninstalled.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734645

"1) Size estimation is off. So for 0ad for example we show it's 3.2MB, while it requires a -data package that is a 546MB download and 1.3GB on disk.

2) When removing the game from Software, the -data package will not be removed. This can either be solved with some special-casing in Software (easy) or convincing the maintainers to "do the right thing" (probably not easy)."

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

Any news?

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

I'm unsubscribing to this report.

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

Related bugreport: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711171

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

Upstream report:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/issues/14