Bug#263162: Please describe your tasksel policy, and re-add the tex task
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> wrote:
> Andrew Pollock wrote:
>> Can you please elaborate? I've just read the README file, and I'm not a lot
>> wiser as to why the tex packages don't fit the policy?
>>
>> I'd like a task for installing latex related stuff.
>
> I suspect that less than 25% of our users use tex. It could conceivably
> fail the requirement that 90% of our users know what the task is from
> its short description.
I generally question those criteria, I think I have written about this
in a different mail.
> Moreover, "tex" is not really a task.
> "typesetting" or "word processing" or the like would be, but these and
> the desktop task would have significant overlap, which I prefer to
> avoid.
TeX is for sure *not* word processing, because the latter is what people
do with a word processor program, like Openoffice.
I think something like "text processing and typesetting" could be a
useful task, with sgml tools, docbook, makeinfo etc. But that's a
different thing, and I won't work on this.
> tex is also not appropriate to be in a task because anyone who wants tex
> knows they want tex, and does not want to bumble around selecting
> ill-defined tasks (like "word processing") and hope that they get tex.
> Instead, they want to manually select their packages, and I expect them
> to do so. Tasks are for people who know what task they want to do, but
> are not very picky about the tools the system chooses to do it.
This is not what I learned tasksel to be, as a user years ago. However,
I have no good suggestion regarding TeX. Perhaps a meta-package is more
appropriate; however I am not sure what should be in it.
Although I question the usefulness of the criteria you use for tasksel
(or of a tasksel using those criteria), I don't mind very much, and I
will accept this as it is. Maybe sometime a meta package comes about.
For me, I would close this bug - however, since other people took part
in the discussion, I will wait a couple of days.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie
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