deb recommends install gnome desktop by gnome-shell-extension-appindicator

[mviereck]

xpra v4.1-r28110 from winswitch repository on debian bullseye/testing

The deb package of xpra contains the recommends gnome-shell-extension-appindicator | plasma-desktop. This in turn depends on package gnome-shell that basically installs a full Gnome desktop. Alternatively it needs package plasma-desktop.

I want neither Gnome nor Plasma desktop to be installed as a dependency of xpra. A regular update would have installed Gnome on my system, and after I've figured out the reason, I had to remove xpra and reinstall it without recommends.

Please remove this dependency from the recommends list.

[Antoine Martin]

Ah, the problem here is that gnome users end up with an unusable systray unless this extension is installed..
Can you think of another package we could add to this OR condition instead?
One that would not require gnome to be installed on your system?
ie:

gnome-shell-extension-appindicator | plasma-desktop | whatever?

[mviereck]

I have no good idea yet.
As a personal solution only for myself I can install xpra with --no-install-recommends, and I am fine.

As a general solution gnome-shell-extension-appindicator should only be installed if gnome-shell is already installed.
I doubt that a deb package can be configured this way, at least I am not aware.
An OR package would have to be one that is installed on no Gnome system but on all others. Likely no such package exists.

Maybe the Debian maintainers could be asked if they change the gnome-shell-extension-appindicator dependency gnome-shell from 'required' to 'suggested'. But I doubt that they would do that because the 'required' dependencies should install everything that is needed to use a package.

Maybe you could move gnome-shell-extension-appindicator to 'suggested'? However, close to no one looks at the suggested packages.

Maybe xpra could print a message if it runs on Gnome and recommend to install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator if missing?

[Antoine Martin]

Maybe xpra could print a message if it runs on Gnome and recommend to install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator if missing?

The exact libraries and extensions needed to get an actually usable system tray depends on both the distribution (and version of) and the desktop environment.
Also, the package name varies with each distribution and it may not even be needed for some, ie: topicons-plus is what you want on Fedora / RHEL.

So anyway, gnome-shell is generally a pain to deal with (and not just the dependencies), so r28129 moves the dependency to Suggests.
r28130 also adds a warning message.
And when users complain that the system tray does not work out of the box, we can point them to the gory details herein.

New beta builds are available (untested).

[mviereck]

Thank you! Now the beta package installs well with reasonable dependencies.
Clever to check for XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP before printing a message.

[migration script]

this ticket has been moved to: ​https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/2979