In Vivid shimmer-themes misses reverse depend on numix-gtk-theme

[Mélodie]

Hi,

I thought shimmer-themes had become a meta-packages so I removed it without any error or warning shown. The next time I used apt-get it suggested to "apt-get autoremove" numix-gtk-themes.

Could you fix it please?

Best regards
Mélodie

[Thaddaeus Tintenfisch (thad-fisch-deactivatedaccount)]

What exactly should be fixed here? The package numix-gtk-theme is marked as automatically installed and no other packages depend on it (after the removal of shimmer-themes).
Simply run one of the following commands to resolve the issue:

  sudo apt-mark manual numix-gtk-theme
  sudo apt-get install numix-gtk-theme

[Mélodie (meets)]

Hello,

I don't call that a simple solution for end users. There should be something which can be done on the side of the package : the other themes which are pulled in by shimmer-themes do not suffer the same fate, why would numix theme be the victim?

[Thaddaeus Tintenfisch (thad-fisch-deactivatedaccount)]

Only two themes are pulled in by shimmer-themes in Ubuntu 15.04. However, the dependencies are slightly different:

$ apt-cache rdepends numix-gtk-theme
numix-gtk-theme
Reverse Depends:
  ubuntu-gnome-desktop
  shimmer-themes

$ apt-cache rdepends greybird-gtk-theme
greybird-gtk-theme
Reverse Depends:
  xfce4-settings
  shimmer-themes

[Mélodie (meets)]

I am using Openbox without a DM therefore xfce4-settings didn't interfere. I see in the shimmer-themes description:

Depends: greybird-gtk-theme (>= 1.8.0), numix-gtk-theme (>= 1.8.0)
Suggests: albatross-gtk-theme, bluebird-gtk-theme, orion-gtk-theme, shimmer-wallpapers

I have also tried bluebird-gtk-theme and orion-gtk-theme, they look good too. I like greybird-gtk-theme most but it is affected by a bug, therefore I was removing it.
The bug it is affected with is reported here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shimmer-themes/+bug/1448487

From the Synaptic history:
*****
Commit Log for Thu Apr 23 22:36:53 2015

Les paquets suivants ont été complètement supprimés :
greybird-gtk-theme

Les paquets suivants ont été supprimés :
shimmer-themes
Commit Log for Thu Apr 23 22:36:53 2015

*****

I was not surprised to see shimmer-themes removed, but next when I used apt-get in the console for something else, numix-gtk-theme was in the autoremove list.

 I can see why it is more comfortable to have a meta-package for Xfce4 as it is meant for it. Is there a solution on the meta-package side so that this doesn't happen? Or none, as long as a meta-package is used?

[Sean Davis (bluesabre)]

Hello.

The shimmer-themes metapackage depends on greybird-gtk-theme and numix-gtk-theme so that they are pulled at the same time. If you remove that package, there is no longer anything that depends on numix-gtk-theme so it would also be removed with autoremove.

As thad-fisch indicated, using one of those two commands (marking as manual, installing while installed) will mark it as manually installed. This is a preferred solution when manually removing metapackages:
  sudo apt-mark manual numix-gtk-theme
  sudo apt-get install numix-gtk-theme

"I don't call that a simple solution for end users."
Packages are only auto-removed when using the commandline utilities, specifically with "apt-get autoremove". If you're using these commands, it is unlikely that you're a beginner user. Since you're in the terminal, if numix-gtk-theme is removed, simply install it back and it will be marked as manually installed.

Marking this one as invalid, the metapackage is working as expected.