Arch Linux

network-manager-applet is an applet to connect the PC to other networks. While it runs fine without gnome-keyring, it *CAN NOT* fulfil it's role without gnome-keyring (or equivalent) installed.

I've already come across plenty of situations where hours had been wasted debugging a wireless network and it's configuration simply because gnome-keyring was not installed.

While nm-applet runs fine without it, considering gnome-keyring optional is like considering the "open" function on an image viewer optional: it is of absolutely no use at all (or does anyone use nm-applet for wired networks?).

It's also pretty hard to trace down the issue; gnome-keyring is actually an optional dependency of a dependency (ie: looking at the optdepends of network-manager-applet or it's details doesn't make it obvious). It's rather an optdepends of a dependency, but it's nm-applet which fails, not libsecret, AFAIK.


If gnome-keyring can be replaced with another package which provides the same features, maybe all of them need to add a "Provides=secret-service", and have network-manager-applet depend on "secret-service".
If libsecret that's actually failing to run properly without gnome-keyring, then I guess this issue should be redirected there.


Sorry if this sounds like a rant; that's not the intention, I'm just trying to be clear as why I consider this broken as-is.