Installing Nautilus in Xubuntu 12.10 pulls in Redundant Packages as Dependencies

[Leo H]

Nautilus (nautilus 1:3.5.90.really.3.4.2-0ubuntu4.1) – when installed under under Xubuntu 12.10 using Synaptic – directly or indirectly pulls in Brasero, Zeitgeist and other application packages as dependencies.

― These additional packages such as Brasero and Zeitgeist are not requested nor required, only the file browser/manager Nautilus itself is.

― Further, these extra packages provide no essential or indispensable functionality to Nautilus itself. Nautilus is complete in itself as a file browser/manager. (The installation is on a series of some 100 netbooks which by their very design never have CD/DVD drives.)

― Zeitgeist, moreover, is a Stasi-like service — covertly and comprehensively snooping on, logging and chanelling information on user activities and events. As such, the presence of Zeitgeist is highly undesirable on professional Linux systems designed to be transparent in their behaviour, well-controlled and secure against information leakage.

Superfluous dependencies not only result in wasted space and resources allocated to such undesired and undesirable packages.

But this bug also concerns a core design principle: Linux packages should only be included as dependencies when they provide essential or indispensable functionality to the package that is actually and deliberately selected for installation.

These redundant dependencies should therefore be removed from the Nautilus package.

[Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131)]

Can you post the output of this command? (Make sure you press 'N' to cancel installation if the packages are still unacceptable to you):
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends nautilus

Note that Synaptic has a setting to not pull 'Recommends' packages by default (the equivalent of the --no-install-recommends argument passed to apt in the command above). While I personally prefer modularity, integrating apps (like brasero in nautilus) seems to be all the rage among bigger desktops (KDE/Gnome) right now.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Because Nautilus is compiled with support for Zeitgeist, libzeitgeist is a required dependency. Zeitgeist is simply an activity log manager. If it were transmitting user's activities over the Internet, people would notice and there would be considerable complaining. It does act transparently. Install gnome-activity-journal to see what information is being collected. Or install activity-log-manager and turn "Record Activity" off.

CD burning is a useful feature for a file manager and Brasero is a good choice as it is the GNOME CD burner. Brasero is only a recommends so you can easily uninstall it after installing Nautilus. That being said, perhaps it should be a "suggests" instead of a "recommends"; the main meta-packages already depend on brasero or xfburn any way.

[Leo H (leo-h-hildebrandt)]

@ Dave (#1)
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends nautilus gives:
nautilus is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
(When constructing the master image for the netbooks, after installing nautilus we have manually purged all packages pulled in by nautilus which were not essential to nautilus (ie, which did not break nautilus).)

@ Jeremy (#2)
I take your point. But you do assume that users are sufficiently au fait with Zeitgeist to have the knowledge that they need to install these two separate helper programs (gnome-activity-journal and activity-log-manager) that are required (1) to see what it actually is that Zeitgeist collects about their activities and events, and (2) to be able to disable such information gathering and channelling. I tend to think that this is an unreasonable assumption.

In my view it would be better if the requirement to install such additional programs would be unnecessary by default, and that, instead, installing Zeitgeist and its components – and the consequences thereof – would have to be a conscious, deliberate, informed and well-understood choice.

Similarly for Brasero, opt-in rather than ex-post opt-out seems the more appropriate way when putting together systems. (Realistically in practice, which user actually fully knows and understands what redundant and/or undesired applications get pulled in by other applications.)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for nautilus (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Leo H (leo-h-hildebrandt)]

This issue persists to this day and so far remains unresolved.