On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 10:18 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
I have to say I share Johann's concerns to some degree. It's quite difficult to see why GNOME is going in this direction of considering IM / social networking systems to be 'core desktop functionality'. They are not. The fact that lots of people use such things does not, in and of itself, make them necessarily a core part of the desktop.
The way the dependency works here is that gnome-shell uses the folks library for displaying contacts as search results in the overview. Folks has a frontend-backend abstraction with a number of different backends (for eds, for libsocialweb, for telepathy...). For the purposes of presenting an integrated experience, we are really mostly interested in the eds and telepathy backends, while the libsocialweb one was one that caused this problem... One obvious solution to the 'bad gnome, it doesn't let me uninstall its bits one-by-one' complaint would be to break out the folks backends as subpackages. I expect us to hard-require the eds and telepathy ones in the shell, but the libsocialweb one could easily be an optional add-on.