Arch Linux

nick_0189

Member

Registered: 2020-12-21

Posts: 45

[SOLVED] Gnome Control Center Lists Cheese as a Hard Dependency

Hello Arch Forums,

tl;dr
Why does the gnome-control-center have so many dependencies? Particularly, why does it depend on a selfie app (Cheese), and is there any way around this? Can I install some parts of Gnome I want to use without installing the whole desktop environment?

I installed Solus OS on a laptop recently and really liked the desktop environment, so I decided to install Budgie on my computer that has Arch Linux on it as something to use when DWM won't work (or when I'm letting somebody else use my computer). I noticed upon installation that some software that was on Solus was not installed with Budgie, and I was kind of wanting to replicate the Solus environment a little bit because of how much I liked it. One piece of software I liked that was missing was the settings app, which allows for one to easily change things such as default applications, users, touchpad sensitivity, etc. Budgie is based on gnome, so the settings app used on Solus was the gnome-control-center. I like for a minimal amount of software to be installed on my computer. I don't like for things to be installed unnecessarily or without a purpose. I was surprised when I found that the Gnome settings app listed other apps, such as Cheese, as dependencies that must be installed with it.

Why does Gnome require this? It doesn't seem like a settings program should have a hard dependency on a camera program. I've had a lot of trouble before with getting just some parts of the Gnome desktop environment installed and not others before. I know there is a aur package that is the gnome-control-center without a hard dependency on Cheese, but that just solves part of the problem. I would like to be able to install some parts of the Gnome DE without having to install the entire DE. Does anybody know a better way around this?

Also, I'd like to add that I don't mean to provoke an argument over different desktop environments or be overly critical of Gnome, but this is a little pattern that has been bothering me for a while now and I would like to know if there is some sort of reason for it or a way to around it.

Thanks,
Nick

Last edited by nick_0189 (2021-07-30 19:41:40)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,337

Re: [SOLVED] Gnome Control Center Lists Cheese as a Hard Dependency

There is no way around it without patching the settings application, this comes up time and time again and would be something you'd have to bring up to the GNOME people as to why that is the case. See e.g. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=253658 for earlier cases of this. This particular caveat is fairly simple via https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gnom … r-nocheese others might not be.

icar

Member

Registered: 2020-07-31

Posts: 562

Re: [SOLVED] Gnome Control Center Lists Cheese as a Hard Dependency

Line 52 of the PKGBUILD: -D cheese=false