Questions about tasks and profiles for the debian-cd program (Was: slink_cd v 0.98
On Tuesday 5 January 1999, at 22 h 43, the keyboard of Steve McIntyre
<stevem@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> I see a fair number of the suggested combinations contain "Priority:extra"
> packages while other optional packages are not covered. To me, this would
> suggest that these extra packages should be elevated to optional at
> least...?
This is a difficult issue. First, a bit of history. I took over the
maintenance of these files for slink. They were already in hamm and I don't
know what were the criteria for choices. When there was a doubt, I adopted the
choice of the previous maintainer.
You can see several examples of this subjectivity. For instance, lpr is not
included (despite its Priority: Important) because the maintainer preferred
lprng (whih conflicts with lpr). Since I agree with him, I let it that way,
but it can be seen as a violation of Debian policy by the guy who uses the
power of being the task list maintainer :-)
I must confess I worked more on internal consistency (I developed the tool to
check automatically that the dependencies are met) than on choices such as
"Should we include twm or not"? which are a good way to start a flame-war if I
ask the question on debian-devel.
> Has any work been done on equivalent package selections for non-i386
> architectures?
In theory, they should work for every architecture (see the present discussion on debian-devel, where maintainers of other ports scream loudly when it is suggested to release slink only for the i386). Because Debian is one distribution, running the same on several architectures.
But in practice, it seems, according to the m68k maintainer, that there is a drift, and the current boot-floppies package does not provide anything to deal with it. There are several possible solutions but no implementation. Ideas welcome. (Warning: there are traps underneath.)
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