trinity-users@lists.pearsoncomputing.net

Message: previous - next
Month: January 2019

Re: [trinity-users] removing stuff that's not trinity

From: "David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@...>
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2019 22:34:07 -0600
On 01/17/2019 10:20 AM, dep wrote:
> is there a decent recipe for the removal of kde/plasma stuff? i suppose
> it's worthwhile to keep gnome (or something) around in case for some reason
> i can't get into tde, and of course there are gnome/gtk apps i use under
> tde. but it seems as if the upgrade brought me a load of stuff that i don't
> want, and i'm not sure that it plays nicely. i can do a search on "trinity"
> of course, to find tde packages, but i don't know of any search term that
> limits the results to non-trinity kde applications and libraries.

This unfortunately just distro-bloat. There are a number of reasons for it.
Primarily related to Plasma/Frameworks pieces/parts is the fact that any
application compiled to use, e.g. the Plasma file-chooser, etc.. will need
various parts of Plasma/Frameworks installed. Since there are still Qt4/kde4
based apps -- you get that too. The same goes for Gtk+2 and Gtk+3 based UI
widgets.

This isn't a problem unique to ubuntu 18, it affects everyone.

Further complicating the picture are the package managers that can be
configured (some by default) to pull in "recommended" packages instead of
limiting installation to hard dependencies. Even though the package pulled in
was not a hard-dependency, if it uses Qt Frameworks or a part of Plasma, you
get it that way too.

Even tiny dialogs such as pinentry-qt or pinentry-gtk can pull in a host of
toolkit libraries, just so you can be prompted for a password by, e.g. gpg
within your desktop.

The only real solution (and it isn't a total solution) is to make sure only
hard-dependencies are installed by your package manager -- and even then, that
will just minimize, but not eliminate the menagerie of toolkit dependencies
that get pulled in.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.


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