Re: Git install crashed nearly whole System

["brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>]

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On 2021-03-14 at 18:23:40, Christian Strasser wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I installed Git yesterday on my system. For that I used “sudo apt-get
> install git-all”.  During the installation a lot of very important
> packages got removed! It was horrible, and I couldn’t use my gnome
> desktop environment at all! A lot off dependencies got lost!
> Fortunately, I could save my system through read out the information
> about removed packages from the apt history.
> 
> Today I totally removed git and tried to install everything again with
> the same instruction. The same misbehavior did happen!

This is best reported to Debian because it's a packaging problem, but
I'll tell you what's happening.

By default, Debian installs recommends.  When you specified git-all, you
also asked to install git-daemon-run or git-daemon-sysvinit, and the
former is the preferred option.  So that causes systemd to be
uninstalled and sysvinit to replace it instead, and because GNOME on
Debian is configured to require systemd and not to work with sysvinit,
GNOME gets removed.

There are a couple problems here.

First, you don't want to install git-all as a package because it has
this behavior, and git-all should not be configured such that installing
it causes your init system to be changed.  That is a serious packaging
problem.

Second, GNOME should gracefully work with whatever init system is on the
system, so that users can pick the one that's right for them.  Non-Linux
systems don't even have systemd, so GNOME should be appropriately
packaged so it doesn't have this problem.

None of this has anything to do with Git the project, which provides
source tarballs only and relies on distributors to build binary
packages.  All of these are Debian packaging problems and should be
reported in a series of bugs to Debian (usually via reportbug).

In the meantime, you should install the git and git-man packages if you
want to use core Git, and optionally git-email, git-svn, or git-cvs if
you want various other parts.  You don't really want to run git-daemon
outside of a controlled environment because the Git protocol provides no
authentication or encryption and you shouldn't expose such services
publicly.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US

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