WTF Debian? Let's get some sensible dependencies
OK folks, I am not a very happy camper at the moment. Thanks to some unbelievable stupidity on the part of Whoever is responsible for packaging kernels at Debian I had to re-install my system.
On Saturday a kernel update meandered its merry way from the repos and then didn't install cause dpkg crapped out with a "disk full" error. The "disk" in question beingsda1 aka my boot partition. Not counting the fact that there were still nearly 100MB of free space which should have been enough for a 70MB kernel image that was supposed to replace the previous image the boot partition in question was also sized according to Debian's very own suggestions during the original installation of the system. An original installation, one must mention, that took place when kernel images already had reached their current bloated size. A humble suggestion to the installer honchos: If the user is about to use a whole disk for "single-boot" install and said disk is hundreds of GB in size, why not make sda1 == 1GB instead of the current value of 350MB? I mean, future kernels will most probably not be smaller than current ones. gParted Live-CD was no help. No matter which hoops I jumped through it just wouldn't grow the sda1 primary partition. Quick decision: Backup home and etc and install a new system with a new partition map. Off to the Debian website and download Lenny aka Debian 5.0.3 as a net-install ISO. Installation was the usual Debian yawn-fest up to the point where one has to decide which crap is to go on top of the basic system. After previous bad experiences with selecting "desktop", which gives you "The full GNOME" complete with 4 versions of everything plus the kitchen sink, I opted out at that point and rebooted into the console from whence to install bits and pieces as wanted. Comes the time for CUPS ... CUPS now depends on Samba. For no sane reason whatsoever. Don't want Samba? Can't have CUPS! At the same time sane dependencies like e.g. foomatic and ghostscript don't exist for CUPS. You have to find those yourself. Which of course every noob will do by instinct ... Next piece of crap - avahi. Who wants it? Nobody! Who uses it? Nobody! So why the fuck is it a hard dependency for the gnome-desktop-environment package? Don't believe me? Try apt-get purge avahi and apt-get will tell you where to stick your freedom of choice. It's either GNOME with avahi or no GNOME at all. Now here's a question: Why is there no package called e.g. "gnome-minimal" which gives you the panels and drawers plus a a window manager and a minimalistic set of the most necessary applets, together with synaptic and a printing system? The way things are at the moment the user has the choice between bloat and megabloat or a painstaking search for individual components. And for fuck's sake take "treat recommendations as dependencies" out of the default settings of apt and its front ends.
