So I have been following this whole discussion and I would like to provide my input to Ole and the blends team.
- adding a new important package to work-around the fact that tasksel maintainers were busy/inactive was not a good move. As you all noted, the list of blends does not change often enough to warrant separate maintenance. And by doing that you circumvented the review by the debian-installer team which clearly has made design choices to keep the installer simple. - the tasksel list with or without the blends already grew and can be confusing for new users, it should not be shown by default but should be offered as an option in all cases. See below for my suggestion. - trying to keep blends-tasks now because we have no better option on the table right now is not a good move either. Had you not circumvented the d-i review at the time you introduced blends-tasks, then maybe you could have advertised the limitation of tasksel and we could have found sooner someone willing to fix this even if nobody in the blends team had the required skills... I'm thus suggesting that blends-tasks should be removed and merged in tasksel-data. At the same time, we should fix the installer to bypass that confusing tasksel screen that we always get by default. On Wed, 07 Dec 2016, Philip Hands wrote: > It could be much improved by making it more obvious that the heading is > a heading. Even if we're unable to stop headings having a checkbox, we > could change the text and the hierarchy slightly to be something like > this: > > [ ] === Debian Desktop Environments: > [x] ... Gnome [...] > Would that cheer people up without needing a major rewrite of tasksel? That would be a good change, yes. But more importantly, we need to not show that page at all. I would like to suggest a first screen: Install packages for a: [X] standard desktop [ ] standard server [ ] minimal server [ ] Show me more options You only see "tasksel" if you check the "Show me more options" which should be unchecked by default. There's code that translates each option into default selections at the tasksel level. For instance, if you check "standard desktop" (checked by default like currently, then it enables the "GNOME" task (or whatever was set in the "desktop" kernel command line option) and the "standard installation". If you check standard server, then you get "standard" + "ssh". If you check minimal server, then you get only "ssh". If you select "Show me more options", you can see the effect of each option as you have some tasks already selected. If we do that, then IMO it's fine if the tasksel screen is also cluttered with blends. Christian and Cyril, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think that if we come up with a patch implementing the above, we could get it in stretch? What would be the last delay to come up with such a patch? Anyone up for the challenge? Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Support Debian LTS: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html Learn to master Debian: http://debian-handbook.info/get/