Re: Proposal for reducing the number of unremovable apps in GNOME Software

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:

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I don't see the relation between sandboxable and unremovable.

On an image-based OS, wouldn't it be the case that anything that's not a flatpak would be part of the image, and therefore unremovable? I've been looking at this issue recently from a slightly different perspective and wondered whether "part of the base OS" might be a simpler and more natural replacement for <mandatory_for_desktop>.

The argument for making some things unremovable has always been that their absence leads to a broken system. I can see how that applies to gnome-software (can't install apps anymore when it is missing) and to yelp (every apps help menuitem is broken when yelp is missing). But I don't see how this applies to gnome-screenshot (as Florian pointed out, the keyboard shortcuts for sceenshots don't rely on it anymore) or to nautilus (no icons on the desktop in GNOME3).

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I guess the question there is "what does it mean to be broken?" Is a system without a web browser broken? What about if there's no way to view an image or view a PDF? What about a terminal, or other apps that could be used in a support context (Logs, Usage, Problem Reporting, Screenshot, etc)?

Defining what the essential apps are would likely have design repercussions (not necessarily unresolvable ones). As already mentioned in this thread, there are links between the the apps (an example - just recently we've been talking about having a link from the background setting to Photos). At a higher level, we do tend to think of the core apps a integral part of the product, both in terms of how they integrate with one-another and how essential functionality is distributed.

Allan