debian-boot: This is diverging into a discussion of task- packages. It's
probably reasonable to keep discussion on -policy rather than duplicate it
on both lists, I guess.
On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 03:56:15PM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
As far as mutliple preferred packages, my intent is that such a phrase
is an oxymoron; the whole *idea* is help the users select one particular
implementation out of several possibilities. Basically, we'd be saying
If you're not sure which {web-server, whatever} to install, try this
one first.
Well, which of emacs or vi should be the preferred editor? Or should
nano, joe, jed, or something else be the preferred editor? Why shouldn't
we say try emacs vi, and see what you like, otherwise, choose some
other one? Why is that worse than saying try emacs, and see if you
like it, otherwise choose some other one?
There're technical reasons why we can only recommend one MTA conveniently,
which means we have to limit ourselves to one MTA for people to try by
default, so we do. But there doesn't seem any huge reason to limit other
things to just a single best possibility.
It's not the same as task packages, because the intent of those (as
I understand it) is to group various packages that work together. I'm
also bothered (a little) by the task-webserver-roxen (why is there no
task-webserver?), in that it doesn't offer much guidance (because it
implies the existence of t-w-apache, t-w-boa, etc.).
I don't really understand task packages. I'd assume that they're there
to make it easy for people to do some particular common tasks (setup a
desktop environment, interact with your computer in japanese, play music,
do 3d graphics, program).
It seems to me like it might be bing abused somewhat as an excuse to
advertise particular groups of packages. task-webserver-roxen, and
task-x-window-system come to mind as being more an excuse to group a
bunch of packages together than really focussing on being something
useful for the prospective user, for example. OTOH, I want a useful X
environment isn't an unreasonable task.
Actually, going a bit further on that idea.
The *task* is really usable 2d windowing environment for accessing
programs, it's not kde, or gnome, or xlib, or motif. Is it really
sensible to have the choice between the various windowing toolkits
made here? Would it be better/possible to have a task-desktop that
included both gnome and kde, and the best apps from both, and just let
the user use them? Obviously the packager would have to make a choice
amongst xdm, gdm and kdm, but that doesn't seem unreasonably difficult.
Going through the task packages in my available file:
c-dev, c++-dev, python-dev, tcltk-dev, objc-dev, fortran
- i want to program in foo
debian-devel
- i want to create debian packages
sgml, tex
- i want to write documents in foo
german, chinese-s, chinese-t, japanese, spanish, polish
- i (or some of my users) speak foo
games
- i want to play games on this computer
science
- i want to do science on this comuter (this seems a little too
broad, but maybe no more so than games)
newbie-help
- i'm a newbie and want to learn about unix ?
These seem like reasonable helper packages, that'll set up your system
to do something relatively complicated, relatively simply:
dns-server
news-server
imap
parallel-computing-dev
parallel-computing-node
database-pg (perhaps sql-database would be a better name)
samba (a more generic name would be more consistent, but maybe not better)
We also have a few my computer is a little different to others task- packages,
which probably make some sense:
laptop
dialup
dialup-isdn
I don't see a point to:
python
- how do I know whether I'm going to write complicated apps or not?
gnome-games
- i just want to play games, i don't care what toolkit they use
tcltk
- how do i kow if i want to run tcltk programs? debian packages will
install it if they need it, presumably the lsb will do likewise,
and anything i buy will tell me what i need to install, surely?
debug
- if I'm going to be programming, I'm probably going to be debugging.
if I'm not programming why would i be debugging?
devel-common
- C and C++ and Objective C are already covered with the specific
tasks, what's the point?
doc
- eh?? i have to go out of my way to get General documentation??
python-web
- a general i want to work on interactive web sites task would make
sense to me (one that included, presumably, a free java, and zope,
and tomcat, and tools to do cgi in perl and python and whatever else)
but just for pythn? apt-get install zope if that's what you want.
The following seem to be just random collections of packages:
