Wayland and Soiftware Updater

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 03:45:43AM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> In looking through the packages descriptions (which it lists, rather
> than the package names), I found
> ""Implementation of the Wayland EGL platform - runtime"

That's libwayland-egl1-mesa, which provides support for clients that run
on Wayland, but doesn't cause your system to run Wayland.  It won't
affect your system if you aren't running Wayland.

> From what I understand, Wayland serves no useful purpose, and only
> exists to damage people's systems.

It's clear that you don't like it, but there's no need to ascribe
malicious intent to its authors.  The code of conduct says that we
strive to "assume good intentions".

> Is this Wayland thing, really necessary, and, as the Software updater
> appears to indiscriminately add new software, rather than simply
> updating existing software, can we please have a software updater,
> that only updates existing software, with wanted (and, only what is
> wanted, rather than bloating) software being able to be installed via
> another application, like Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center?

Since (for example) libgtk-3-0 depends on libwayland-egl1-mesa in 16.04,
it is hardly the software updater's fault.  I strongly advise against
attempting to remove it, because that will either remove packages you
actually do need or break your system's dependency database; in either
case you will do more damage than you would have done if you'd just left
well alone.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]