On Thu, 2006-03-02 at 01:28 -0500, Charles Fry wrote: > First of all, let me express my thanks for the fine work which has > resulted in the current junior-* packages. They have proven to be most > helpful. > > My big complaint is that it is a lot of work to install all of the > current meta pacakges. Is there any reason why there isn't a single > master metapackage that depends on all of the others, for those of us > who want to install junior-*, not only now but also tracking all new > junior-* in the future?
Yes, there is. It used to be that the packages were collected together under into a "task" which was installable by tasksel. However, because of the great size of Debian Jr. it would not all fit on the first Debian install CD, which is a condition for being included in tasksel. Besides which, metapackages are fragile: if one dependency cannot be satisified, the whole metapackage is uninstallable. A master meta-package would exacerbate that problem by allowing a solitary unsatisfiable dependency block upgrades. In a stable distribution, we can resolve such problems, but it would make things very difficult for testing/unstable users. Since, in spite of the number of years Debian Jr. has been around, it is still considered to be a beta CDD, it is undesirable to cause such difficulty for the testing/unstable users, who form a significant percentage of the user population, for such a small gain in convenience for the stable users. My recent proposals concerning debtags will address this problem directly by giving the user a way to make arbitrary selections of Debian Jr. packages, either the whole of them, or any subset, depending on the user's criteria. The details of implementation are still open for discussion, but I believe we already have sufficient tools so that a simple script could be made (with a GUI front-end if desired) to give us back tasksel-like functionality, only using debtags for selection instead of metapackages. As to keeping up-to-date with new additions to Debian Jr., I think we need to use an apt hook of some sort to ensure that our debtags selections get applied to each update. I welcome discussion & code in support of this idea. Ben -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
