GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 723922
Do not allow uninstalling anything required by a system application
Last modified: 2018-01-24 16:49:06 UTC
A user reported this in another bug: "nm-connection-editor is shown in Software, and is removable; it removes in this case Control Center (silently), and that’s really bad." Since this app is required by an uninstallable system app (gnome-control-center), it should itself be uninstallable.
apps should not require other apps. at the end of the day, thats a packaging error.
I think the fix here is "hide nm-connection-editor from gnome-software", no?
Maybe. Or perhaps better would be "hide any app that depends on another app" since that would eliminate this entire class of issues. I think it'd be good to be more robust in general with this: you can say it's a packaging error (and if so then I think we can hide it), but the fact is that it's going to happen (unless each downstream adopts some automated process to catch this situation). (Not clearing needinfo since I'm sure that's intended for Matthias.)
The reason I cleared the NEEDINFO is that it gets "assigned" to the bug reporter (me), unlike some other Bugzillas, and there's nothing more for me to provide here, so setting back to unconfirmed.
If nm-connection-editor is required by the control center, it is essentially a core app, and should be treated in the same way as the other core apps.
Right, we don't show this now.
I would consider it as fixed only if the app removal algorithm checked if some core system component requires the app about to be removed. See also: bug 711171.
I agree, I don't consider this fixed, and it's a distinct issue from bug #711171. It's not hard to see some core system component, in Fedora and especially in other distributions, growing a inadvertent (or intentional!) dependency on some random app, and I expect removing that app would still destroy your system... right? This is too fragile.
E.g. in Fedora, gtk-doc currently depends on the Links web browser, for whatever reason. Hard to imagine why, but it's true. Now, if gtk-doc can have such a crazy GUI dependency, then so could X (e.g. in Arch and various other distros, the X server actually depends on some GUI X testing tools); remove X and we have a big problem. GNOME Software should be robust to this case and not destroy my computer, instead of hoping that distros never make packaging errors.
(In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #8) > I agree, I don't consider this fixed, and it's a distinct issue from bug > #711171. Not so different because from developer's point of view the only difference is that bug 711171 would display a text "Do you want to continue? [Yes][No]" and the user has a choice while this bug would display a text "You can't continue [OK]" and we would never continue. (In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #9) > E.g. in Fedora, gtk-doc currently depends on the Links web browser, for > whatever reason. One can claim this is a packager's error but we should handle such errors rather than allowing a disaster.
Keep in mind: gnome-software is not a package management UI. You are halfway down the slippery slope to full-on dependency madness here.
Of course, we should display only the information which is valuable for the user (which means the information related with the apps, every single package) and only if otherwise an action would cause a big disaster.
(In reply to Rafal Luzynski from comment #12) > (which means the information related with the apps, every single package) Sorry, a typo: I meant *not* every single package.
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