This was going to be a bug, but since fjp says it's now behaving
properly, I better first ask.
The preferred way to install a Debian system has always been to
install a minimal system and then assume an install-on-demand
strategy for additional packages. At least, I have heard this to be
called "the Debian way of installing", have always advocated, and
received amazing amounts of positive feedback about it. In the past,
it has been possible to do this by opting not to run dselect or
aptitude.
The current incarnation of base-config, however, does not give you
a choice. Even in expert mode, it displays a task selection screen,
and even if I opt for manual package selection (or select nothing at
all), I get dumped into aptitude with *a lot* of packages selected.
For instance, gcc and friends are all marked for installation, but
I don't want those on most of my systems.
The policy says:
standard
These packages provide a reasonably small but not too limited
character-mode system. This is what will be installed by default
if the user doesn't select anything else. It doesn't include
many large applications.
which does not read to me that all priority standard packages must
be installed on a Debian system. Thus, I feel that choice is being
taken away... It's also not how Debian previously worked.
The result of this is that users end up with systems that have a lot
already installed, whether needed or not. I thought this was the
domain of RedHat & Co...
Please give the user the option to skip package selection
(especially tasksel or whatever is used) and don't force aptitude or
tasks on the user in the way that base-config does so right now.
I find it especially dangerous to present the user with tasks up
front simply because this tends to cause users to install way too
much, thereby possibly decreasing the performance and/or security of
the system.
FWIW, the following two seem to work:
1. Start aptitude and simply quit right back out of it.
Unfortunately, the package selection will propagate onwards to
the next invocation of aptitude.
2. Simply skip the software installation step. This will leave
a minimal system.
Comments welcome.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (600, 'testing'), (98, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-cirrus
Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_GB.UTF-8)
Versions of packages base-config depends on:
ii adduser 3.59 Add and remove users and groups
ii apt 0.5.27 Advanced front-end for dpkg
ii bsdutils 1:2.12-10 Basic utilities from 4.4BSD-Lite
ii console-data 2002.12.04dbs-46 Keymaps, fonts, charset maps, fall
ii debconf 1.4.38 Debian configuration management sy
ii passwd 1:4.0.3-30.2 Change and administer password and
pn tasksel Not found.
--
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org>
: :' : proud Debian developer, admin, user, and author
`. `'`
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system
Invalid/expired PGP subkeys? Use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver!
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature