I’m quite aware if I want to uninstall some app, for example Thunderbird, the package manager has to also uninstall ubuntu-mate-desktop which is only a meta package of little use after initial install. BUT…
Could that affect some creative future package management that checks for the ubuntu-mate-desktop package to configure something properly? Or is this speculation a little far out?
Also, is there a system concept of all these package dependents? I don’t recall seeing so many. In other words, I expect Caja and Pluma but not Rhythmbox and Cheese.
I’m not by any means an expert on this stuff, so hopefully someone can clarify.
If you use something like aptitude to set all the dependencies to ‘manually installed’, those programs
will still get upgraded and you could in theory remove the meta package.
That being said though, a meta package is definitely not useless after first install.
If any packages gets added or removed from the meta package by the maintainer like
a new software center, one browser gets swapped for another, a package gets rolled back
because its unstable, etc, you wouldn’t get those changes
which could definitely affect some other parts of the system.
A meta package just makes it easy for maintainers to manage installation and updates/changes to
a range of packages without conflicts.
This is something I’m hoping to address in 16.10. I did try in 16.04 it was just too much work and not enough time to complete.
Some of the packages installed by Ubuntu MATE have recommended packages that end up pulling in either most of GNOME3 or most of Unity. To work around this Ubuntu MATE, like Lubuntu, doesn’t follow recommended packages in the seeds or meta-packages. We have to manually resolve any important recommended packages. The side effect is we can’t make packages recommended in the seeds or meta-packages.
In order to fix this, the packages that pull in undesirable stuff need patching to support MATE. I’ve done a good deal of this, but there is still some more that need updating. When complete stuff like Thunderbird, Firefox, Cheese, Rhythmbox etc will be recommended and you’ll be able to remove those packages without removing the meta-package too.
TIA