Why does mint-meta-mate (normal package) depend on mate-common (development package)?

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wpyoga
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Why does mint-meta-mate (normal package) depend on mate-common (development package)?

Post by wpyoga »

I just discovered that mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common:

Code: Select all

$ apt depends mint-meta-mate
mint-meta-mate
  Depends: mint-meta-core
  Depends: caja
  Depends: gir1.2-caja
  Depends: folder-color-switcher
  Depends: <libmatedesktop>
    libmate-desktop-2-17
  Depends: <libmatekbd>
    libmatekbd4
  Depends: mate-common
  Depends: mate-control-center
  Depends: mate-desktop
  Depends: mate-icon-theme
  Depends: mate-menus
  Depends: mate-notification-daemon
...
mate-common is a package used for development, and I would think that mint-meta-mate (non-development meta package) should not depend on it, right? Or, am I missing something...?

Anyway, please let me know if I had posted this in the wrong place... thank you :)
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Culaterout
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Culaterout »

History lesson between Mate, Gnome 3 and Unity.

Mate got unsupported by ubuntu and moved to unity. Which most of use didn't have PC or laptop to support Unity and was just horrible. Linux Mint was the only ubuntu based distro that kept Mate DE. Most of use left to CrunchBang Linux based on Debian running openbox. Which kept resources low, cpu and gpu temps down.

Answer your question why is development on mate-common seem to be combined with mint-meta-mate? Simple keep packages small and Wi-Fi wasn't really that reliable or fast. Virtual Machines with VMware were barley taking off and USB stick just got to 10 gigs or more.

Development of Mate has always been for low powered machines. Soon will become obsolete.
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Terryphi »

Culaterout wrote: Mon Jul 26, 2021 6:16 pm Development of Mate has always been for low powered machines. Soon will become obsolete.
I hope not. It fits my needs completely.
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Version: LM 21.3 64bit Mate "If something is worth doing, it is worth doing for free."
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Pjotr »

Terryphi wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 4:28 am
Culaterout wrote: Mon Jul 26, 2021 6:16 pm Development of Mate has always been for low powered machines. Soon will become obsolete.
I hope not. It fits my needs completely.
No worries. There are no indications to the contrary, so we can safely assume that it's there to stay. :)
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Pjotr »

Culaterout wrote: Mon Jul 26, 2021 6:16 pm History lesson between Mate, Gnome 3 and Unity.

Mate got unsupported by ubuntu and moved to unity.
Bollocks. Fake history. It was Gnome 2 that was discontinued. Upstream, by the Gnome devs, so not at Ubuntu. Because the Gnome devs preferred to concentrate their efforts on the radically different Gnome 3.

Mate was a community effort by people who wished to have something that resembled the Gnome 2 that they loved. It has now become a widely accepted DE, and even Ubuntu has a Mate spin now, which has the status of official derivative.
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Culaterout »

Lol! You can tell me all the fake news you want. All of us laptop users in USA with Acer aspire 5 having a AMD Athlon X2 48000 and 8 gigs of ram with a Broadcom card that kept changing every 6 months the type of Broadcom card. Ended up with surprise for Ubuntu with changing GUI and caused the CPU and GPU to overheat. So we jumped to linux mint mate to save on overheating. Yet wasn't what we were looking for so we jumped to CrunchBang after all the unhappy people on Ubuntu posted it. Shortly after that everyone jumped to Arch Linux cause then we could get the update on Broadcom card without waiting on Ubuntu and Linux mint to update driver support for 6 months think at the time we were 3 months from next update. So for mint-meta-mate and mate-common support ended and no more development. Kernel updates and support is done by linux mint and few other distro's for low level machines and linux mint didn't like Unity and did Cinnamon.

Wow all the fake news wrapped around the laptops choices were either inlet celeron, AMD Athlon X2 4800 or intel 7 (which priced at extra 500).
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Pjotr »

Culaterout wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 3:28 pm Lol! You can tell me all the fake news you want. All of us laptop users in USA with Acer aspire 5 having a AMD Athlon X2 48000 and 8 gigs of ram with a Broadcom card that kept changing every 6 months the type of Broadcom card. Ended up with surprise for Ubuntu with changing GUI and caused the CPU and GPU to overheat. So we jumped to linux mint mate to save on overheating. Yet wasn't what we were looking for so we jumped to CrunchBang after all the unhappy people on Ubuntu posted it. Shortly after that everyone jumped to Arch Linux cause then we could get the update on Broadcom card without waiting on Ubuntu and Linux mint to update driver support for 6 months think at the time we were 3 months from next update. So for mint-meta-mate and mate-common support ended and no more development. Kernel updates and support is done by linux mint and few other distro's for low level machines and linux mint didn't like Unity and did Cinnamon.

Wow all the fake news wrapped around the laptops choices were either inlet celeron, AMD Athlon X2 4800 or intel 7 (which priced at extra 500).
You've got your facts wrong. As I already explained to you.

I've lived through all that as well, by the way. Started in 2006 with Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake (with its Gnome 2 desktop, not Mate, which didn't exist then), hated Unity from the start and therefore shifted to Xubuntu, and finally landed some years later at Linux Mint.

Cinnamon and Xfce for me, not Mate, although Mate is alive and kicking. With doubtlessly a great future ahead for it.
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Culaterout »

Ops forgot it was a fork of gnome2 and they didn't support mate till couple years later. By then all the damage was done and everyone was off distro hopping.

The MATE desktop environment was forked from the GNOME 2 code-base with the intent of retaining the traditional GNOME 2 interface whilst keeping compatibility with modern Linux technology.
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Pjotr »

Culaterout wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 4:34 pm Ops forgot it was a fork of gnome2 and they didn't support mate till couple years later. By then all the damage was done and everyone was off distro hopping.

The MATE desktop environment was forked from the GNOME 2 code-base with the intent of retaining the traditional GNOME 2 interface whilst keeping compatibility with modern Linux technology.
Correct. :)
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by wpyoga »

Thanks for the history lesson guys. I'm new to this desktop development stuff, I usually work on the command line and scripts, etc.

Anyway, I've reported this as a bug on GitHub: https://github.com/linuxmint/linuxmint/issues/403

However, I wonder which repo produces this `mint-meta-mate` package. I've search the Linux Mint github org, but couldn't find it...
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Pjotr »

wpyoga wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 9:07 am However, I wonder which repo produces this `mint-meta-mate` package. I've search the Linux Mint github org, but couldn't find it...
http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Uma

.... but there's no point in your efforts, because there is no problem.
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by wpyoga »

Pjotr wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 9:34 am
wpyoga wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 9:07 am However, I wonder which repo produces this `mint-meta-mate` package. I've search the Linux Mint github org, but couldn't find it...
http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Uma

.... but there's no point in your efforts, because there is no problem.
Thank you, but I was actually looking for the git (maybe it's on github) repo that produces the `mint-meta-mate` package.

The problem is, that mate-common is installed together with mint-meta-mate. In my opinion, this is wrong, because mint-meta-mate is intended to be installed as part of a desktop distribution, while mate-common is a package used for development. If the user wants to do MATE development, then sure, they should install mate-common. Otherwise mate-common should not be installed by default.
Culaterout wrote: Mon Jul 26, 2021 6:16 pm Answer your question why is development on mate-common seem to be combined with mint-meta-mate?
Looking back, I may have worded my original post in an ambiguous way. I wasn't asking why the development on mate-common package combined with mint-meta-mate (which I don't think is true), the question was why a development package is installed together with a non-development package. I thought it was wrong, but I would really appreciate it if someone can explain to me why it's not wrong :)

I'm sorry if this is confusing, I'm just trying to set things straight here.
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Pjotr »

wpyoga wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 12:15 pm
Pjotr wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 9:34 am
wpyoga wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 9:07 am However, I wonder which repo produces this `mint-meta-mate` package. I've search the Linux Mint github org, but couldn't find it...
http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Uma

.... but there's no point in your efforts, because there is no problem.
Thank you, but I was actually looking for the git (maybe it's on github) repo that produces the `mint-meta-mate` package.

The problem is, that mate-common is installed together with mint-meta-mate. My opinion is, this is wrong, because mint-meta-mate is intended to be installed as part of a desktop distribution, while mate-common is a package used for development. If the user wants to do MATE development, then sure, they should install mate-common. Otherwise mate-common should not be installed by default.
If a package, any package, is pulled because of a dependency, you can safely assume that it has its use. Regardless of its (terse) description, which may leave some uses unmentioned. Otherwise it wouldn't have been labelled as dependency.

As it's only 65 kB, I fail to see the problem or the need to make a fuss about it.
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by wpyoga »

Pjotr wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 12:23 pm If a package, any package, is pulled because of a dependency, you can safely assume that it has its use. Regardless of its (terse) description, which may leave some uses unmentioned. Otherwise it wouldn't have been labelled as dependency.

As it's only 65 kB, I fail to see the problem or the need to make a fuss about it.
mate-common provides 2 executables, and this is from the man page of each executable:
- mate-autogen: generates all makefiles for MATE packages
- mate-doc-common: used by mate-autogen to include the standard user documentation build files in a MATE package

Okay, maybe it's just me, but I don't think those 2 executables are needed by a normal user. I would appreciate it if someone could explain to me otherwise, though... I understand that some packages sometimes have their own purpose, like for example gcc-10-base, which don't actually provide anything and yet they are listed as a dependency. I somehow fail to see how a user would need mate-common, that's all.

If someone could just point me to the right github repo which generates this package, I would like to make a PR. I guess I should have made this clear from the start, that I would like to contribute and correct a possible packaging error, not ask others to do the work. It looks like a trivial low-hanging fruit that I can contribute on.

I get that people are tired from seeing whiny users who demand developers to do their personal bidding, while providing tersely written bug reports (if it can be called a bug report at all). I'm not that kind of user, and I hope you don't see me as one :)
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate depends on mate-common?

Post by Pjotr »

wpyoga wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 12:47 pm I would like to contribute and correct a possible packaging error, not ask others to do the work. It looks like a trivial low-hanging fruit that I can contribute on.
Indeed that changes my perception. Good luck. :)
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Re: Why does mint-meta-mate (normal package) depend on mate-common (development package)?

Post by Culaterout »

wpyoga wrote: Sat Jul 17, 2021 3:03 am mate-common is a package used for development, and I would think that mint-meta-mate (non-development meta package) should not depend on it, right? Or, am I missing something...?

Anyway, please let me know if I had posted this in the wrong place... thank you :)
"Open Synaptic and search for "Mint-Meta-Mate."

It's described as the "set of packages required to run the MATE desktop environment." My understanding of "meta" packages is that it will pull in the rest of the needed packages, though not necessarily the optional ones, though I haven't done it (I installed Mint with MATE)."

https://community.linuxmint.com/softwar ... -meta-mate

https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... 175507981/

Mint-meta is pulling them as dependencies and is argued as not needed mate-common. 6 years ago

Debian to install mate didn't require the mint-meta package.
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