What is gnome-desktop-environment
 

When I deleted gnome-games* or totem,it have to remove the dependency package gnome-desktop-environment.Can I delete it,what exactly it is?

You cannot not delete the dependency package "gnome-desktop-environment" because thats gnomes core files and without them you will be unable to use the desktop.im guessing your using ubuntu ??, gnome in ubuntu doesnt allow you to delete certain native files :)

You can delete it just fine. In either Debian or Ubuntu, gnome-desktop-environment is a package which simply encompasses the whole GNOME desktop environment including all the default GNOME bells and whistles. This is so that the installer knows what packages to include for a fully functional default GNOME based desktop workstation. As a side effect, it's also useful for a user or sysadmin who wants to add a full GUI desktop environment onto a computer which was installed without one.

Removing this package doesn't actually remove any software at all. Essentially, all it does is let the package manager know that your system no longer has all the default GNOME bells and whistles. If, later on, you decide to add back in everything that a fresh install would have had, all you need to do is get the gnome-desktop-environment package. It'll then automatically install all of its dependencies.

Naturally, there are many GNOME packages which ARE part of the essential core--but those will also require removing something like gnome-core as well as gnome-desktop-environment. If you remove one of those packages, then it's entirely possible that you'll break your GNOME desktop. But the ones that are only in gnome-desktop-environment are just default bells and whistles. Removing totem might prevent you from playing videos, but it won't prevent you from starting up GNOME.

I don't know if Ubuntu uses aptitude, but, in Debian, "aptitude remove gnome-desktop-enviroment" will wipe out the whole thing.

I maintain that this is a good thing, but people should be aware of it. Aptitude is the preferred package manager in Etch, but it requires care if one uses it to install meta-packages.

There is a long, and sometimes confusing discussion about it, here.

It is just a *wrapper* that specifies other packages, it is called a meta-package. If you are using apt or synaptic then it should be fine to let it remove it since it should just remove the *wrapper* or meta-package. If you are using aptitude it may remove the wrapper and a lot more - but I think you can tweak it to not do that.

Just when you run the command look and see what all it wants to remove. If it just wants to remove gnome-desktop-environment then that should be fine. If it wants to remove a BUNCH of packages then stop, of course. :)

I use Debian etch