Debian – Removing iceweasel from Debian

aptitudedebiangnomeiceweasel

On Debian Wheezy, when trying to remove Iceweasel, aptitude suggests, both when I try it via GUI and via aptitude remove iceweasel to also remove the following:

1)     gnome                                                                    
2)     gnome-core                                                               
3)     iceweasel-l10n-pt-br                                                     
4)     task-gnome-desktop                                                       
5)     xul-ext-adblock-plus

Is it safe to proceed with the removal of this packages? It says only about 500KB of data will be removed, but gnome and gnome-core seem kind of important.

Best Answer

Then gnome and gnome-core packages are meta-packages, meaning that they exist only to depend on other packages making it easier to install a complete set of packages. Here iceweasel is considered to be part of the set and so it is included as a dependency. So removing those packages will not remove anything important.

But, if those packages are not installed, when you upgrade your system any new Gnome components that would have been pulled in by those meta packages will not be installed. This still shouldn't cause anything to break since individual packages will have dependencies on the packages that they require; but it would mean that you would no longer have a complete Gnome environment (minus iceweasel).

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