Hey folks, On and off, I've been hacking on tasksel for quite a while to improve the UI there and add better support for things like Blends. I've made some progress in my hacking, but I think I've hit a brick wall and I need to change tack. :-/
What I've ended up doing so far is hacking tasksel to give a poor *approximation* of a tree-style layout: classifying some existing tasks under headers and building a tree, then displaying each of the nodes of the tree one level at a time via the existing debconf setup. It just about works, but it's ugly as all hell and I'm not happy with where I've got to. I've sunk a lot of development time into this, but I don't think it's ready to fly this way. :-( What I *actually* need here is proper support in debconf for tree-style selection. I'm thinking of adding that, adding new types "treeselect" as a tree-equivalent of "select" and "multitreeselect" as an extension of "multitselect". The first one may not even be needed, but would be a trivial simplification of the second, so *meh*. Am I crazy to be considering this? I'm *not* sure that we need this to work in the *general* case (i.e. supporting more packages using this functionality, supporting all the panoply of Debconf frontends). However, I'd also expect that other people might disagree and see more general use cases than just tasksel. :-) AFAICS I'd need to add at least basic support for the new type(s) into all the frontends that *can* support it. So, I have a couple of questions: 1. How flexible is Debconf at coping with a frontend not including support for a type?? 2. Is anybody actually ever using the more obscure (to me!) frontends (e.g. kde, editor)? Is it worth spending time there? -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.