Control: reassign -1 blends-tasks Control: tags -1 moreinfo Hi Holger,
thank you for your bug report to the "blends" package. I would, however question a few things here and also ask for a little bit more information: The "blends-tasks" package was created as a result of working on bug #758116, titled "tasksel: Allow to select Blends selection during installation - just 'DE', 'Web server', 'Mail server' is NOT enough". This bug was created more than two years ago, and nowhere in the bug it was questioned that the blends should be selectable during the installation process. This, however, *requires* to have the information about the blends available during installation, and this makes the package that provides this information "important". Therefore, it is not a policy violation, which in turn removes your argument to make this bug "serious". It also does not "completely break the UI of the installer" -- the selection is in no mean different from the desktop environment selection. I would therefore propose to lower the severity of the bug. Also, I would ask you to do an NMU until the discussion has settled down. This would be an abuse of the NMU. NMUs are meant to deal with unresponsive maintainers, and you did not show any evidence that the blends maintainers are not responsive with respect to this problem. Doing NMUs during a discussion is quite offending. I also don't see a reason to hurry with implementing an unsettled decision: the blends selection is there since almost 8 months now without any significant change or discussion for ~6months. What makes the issue now so urgent that you try to push this within four days? Why didn't you do this half a year ago? We implemented the current solution at that time (and you *knew* that we did) exactly to have some buffer for discussion about critics. Why didn't you use that, but start now when it is quite late? The next point is that you base your critics not on some experience with the current installer but on an outdated, half-a-year-old screenshot. Since then, several improvements were done, both in the appearance in the installer, and in the selection of which blends are there. For the first, see the discussion here: https://lists.debian.org/debian-blends/2016/07/msg00027.html We would also not include all blends there, but select them on an opt-in base. So, if debian-edu is not useful to be installed that we, it shall be removed. At the end, this will reduce the number of selectable blends quite much. I would therefore ask you to rebase your arguments on your experience with the current implementation and not on something that is six months old and not actual anymore. Another point, concerning the argument of "confusing" users: As I said, the blends-tasks package is in place now since eight months, with the current implementation there since ~6 months. Since then there was no single report that someone did not understand the options here -- no bug report, nothing on the installer, blends, or devel mailing lists. I also did an extensive search on the net, and the only thing I found is mentioned in the discussion above and addressed by the changes made after that. Since then, no single problem was reported, with more than 5000 installations according to popcon. This gives a good sign that the addition of the blends to that menu does not confuse people, and I would ask you to show a better empirical evidence that it does. I will not discuss the arguments during the discussion in #758116 here again -- there was a lengthy discussion about this, and the linked postings were covered there as well. It makes no sense to repeat that here again six months later. Concerning your idea of having different install images, I am not convinced that it is a good solution: First, it multiplies the whole image creation process by the number of blends. If we have 10 official architectures and (let's say) 5 blends to be included there, they would then have to manage 60 images instead of 10, with all the requirements that come out of this (installer manual, web page, updates, web space etc.). But it also gives a wrong sign: Debian Pure Blends are by definition integral part of Debian itself. But even now, this is hard to understand for many people -- questions like "what is the difference between Debian Astro and Debian" are quite common, even in front of a poster describing exactly that. With having separate official images for all blends, people would even be more confused. As an example, I would take the Ubuntu approach of having "Ubuntu", "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. instead of installation options -- people usually think that they have to re-install the system if they want to switch from one flavour to the other. Having similar experience with Debian would be bad for the reputation of the Blends, and for Debian in general. Best regards Ole