Comment 4 for bug 32951

I still believe it is a bug. It just was broken (even with ubuntu-desktop installed). Some months ago, I decided to invest some time in Ubuntu by setting up Ubuntu in my small company environment (four networked PCs), to keep Dapper up to date and to research and report everything as a bug that doesn't work just by behaving quite innocently - using standard installers and the Gnome GUI. My strong belief is that I shouldn't break anything by going this route.

Some comments:

1 As a user of those things I don't feel that ubuntu-desktop is the right place to deal with this. nautilus and gnomevfs should make sure that they are working without forcing me to install a package that again forces my to have stuff I might not need. Delocalizing dependencies makes life more miserable.

2. The description of ubuntu-desktop says that I can deinstall if I don't need some desktop packages. It is recommended to keep it for certain upgrade operations. I did deinstall ubuntu-desktzop on one of my two boxes when I was running into trouble with dependencies during some package installations and deinstallations (actually something with totem) when I was trying to get audio to work. I understood that there might be difficulties with upgrades but I <b>was not</b> accepting the tradeoff that important features are breaking without notice. And I guess the typical Ubuntu user will agree with this.

3 The core of my argument basically is that "smb support" is not a (recommended) extra, but a core feature. Quite frankly, I wouldn't have an issue with Webdav moved to extra; this is not a very typical use of networking by typical users.

4 On one of my two Ubuntu boxes, ubuntu-desktop is installed and up to date. Might be that I am bit nitpicking on this, but smb didn't work and the issue has been caused by updating to the latest versioon of libgnomevfs. Probably be the bug will be fixed by a new version of ubuntu-desktop. But until then, it is still a bug.

5 Final point: Synaptic doesn't install recommends by default. And synaptic is the default.

Regards

Erich