Bug#1145003: tasksel: Clean installation of XFCE (sid) pulls in parts of cinnamon

Hello Holger,

On 22/08/2026 09:19, Holger Wansing wrote:
> Am 21. August 2026 13:16:14 MESZ schrieb
>> the recent change to make 'xfce4' a 'Recommends' instead of 'Depends' has
>> unexpected side effects:
>> * The package 'cinnamon' get pulled in (which is not xfce)
>> * The default greeter changed from 'lightdm-gtk-greeter' to 'slick-greeter' (as
>> seen on openQA [1][2])
> 
> This is really unexpected to me.
> Do you know, if these (xfce and mate, addressed in your MR) are the only affected cases?

Those are the affected cases that I knew of when I wrote the bug report.
In openQA you can see the last installations with netinst with tasksel 3.89 [1] followed by the installations with tasksel 3.90 [2].

Since then I've made this full A-B comparison, and I also see issues with LXQt and GNOME.
GNOME only has these issues on UEFI secure boot, not on BIOS boot. The effects on the GNOME installation remind me of #1139453, which is probably also an issue with the dependency chain, but I've been unable to reproduce that issue locally.

In the 'Logs & Assets' tab of each individual test you can find the installation log (complete_install-DI_syslog.txt), the list of installed packages (sut_packages.txt) and more.
In the 'Investigation' tab you can see diffs of some selected files.

I can try to find a fix for LXQt and GNOME later, but I think that the MR [3] could already be deployed and published. If XFCE and Mate installations return to normal, we would have a confirmation that this is a suitable strategy.

With kind regards,
Roland

[1] https://openqa.debian.net/tests/overview?distri=debian&version=testing&build=20260816_7
[2] https://openqa.debian.net/tests/overview?distri=debian&version=testing&build=20260817_1
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/merge_requests/65

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