> standard > These packages provide a reasonably small but not too limited > character-mode system. This is what will install by default if the user > doesn't select anything else. It doesn't include many large applications, > but it does include Emacs (this is more of a piece of infrastructure than > an application) and a reasonable subset of TeX and LaTeX (if this is > possible without X). > > optional > (In a sense everything is optional that isn't required, but that's not > what is meant here.) This is all the software that you might reasonably > want to install if you didn't know what it was or don't have specialized > requirements. This is a much larger system and includes the X Window > System, a full TeX distribution, and many applications. Note that > optional packages should not conflict with each other.
I would like to see TeX and emacs being optional. I always recommend my friends to accept dselect defaults (i.e. standard or higher packages) for a "first stage" or "first dselect pass", and postpone the careful choice among 4000 packages for a second dselect pass. If we downgrade such big packages to optional, the default dselect install will be much faster.
