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Bug#532515: on making decisions vs letting things happen



Le samedi 04 juillet 2009 à 16:46 -0400, Joey Hess a écrit :
> I just want to point out that the current inclusion of tomboy in the
> default desktop install essentially came about by accident:
> 
> * Tomboy was not, afaik, included by default in stable. The gnome-desktop
>   task has never listed it, and gnome only had it as a recommends; tasksel
>   ignored recommends.

Indeed, and this was intentional. See below.

> * After stable was released, many more maintainers began assuming recommends
>   would be installed by default. These recommends had to be manually
>   noticed and tracked in tasksel. IIRC there was a case where the omission
>   of a recommended package could have potentially left X nearly unusable.
>   (Don't remember the details.)

I guess this is ghostscript-cups.

>  At this point it became clear to me that
>   it was time to make tasksel install recommends by default, since
>   manually tracking them in tasks wasn't feasable going forward[2].
> 
> * At that point, I reviewed packages that were only in task lists
>   due to being recommended, and removed them. This had a nice benefit
>   in simplifying the gnome-desktop task[1].

OK. I think we need to make a new round of checks to see whether there
are some other things that are installed now and whether it is wise to
consider them. I can start with a list of things in meta-gnome2, but
there are also some indirect recommends.

      * gnome-games-extra-data : 4 MB download, its utility is purely
        visual. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t know if it’s worth
        the deal, but it’s not as if disk space was expensive these
        days.
      * epiphany-extensions-more : small and really nice to have.
      * gnome-office (abiword, gimp, gnumeric, xsane, inkscape,
        planner) : the main problem with this one is that we get to ship
        two word processors and two spreadsheets. I’m already not fond
        of shipping two browsers. OTOH they both have some features and
        GNOME integration that OOo doesn’t have.
      * gnome-accessibility (at-spi, dasher, gnome-mag, gok, gnome-orca,
        mousetweaks, gnome-accessibility-themes) : I think it’s better
        to have this by default, but the size impact is not negligible.

I don’t know if there is a script that can list all the new indirect
dependencies.

> * I only did a cursory look at the metapackages' recommends to see what
>   additional stuff they would pull in. I assumed some extra recommended
>   stuff would be pulled in, but hopefully not too much. I vaglely
>   remember notcing tomboy would be pulled in via a recommends, but
>   I probably figured the gnome team would notice it eventually and make
>   a decision, or the CD team would deal with any bloat issues later.
> 
> I note that we have a tendancy in Debian to allow changes to be made
> essentially by accident or as a side effect, and then the result becomes
> a status quo that we emotionally defend from change. I hope that doesn't
> happen in this case.
> 
> The Gnome team needs to make a decision whether tomboy should be included
> by default; this decision should probably be made with feedback from the
> CD team[3]. The fact that a one line change to tasksel's code happened to
> make it be included by default in unstable shouldn't be allowed to influence
> the decision.

Well, that won’t influence it; FYI, tomboy was added to the meta-gnome2
Depends in the latest upload, before I learned that Recommends are now
handled by tasksel. 

There were two key reasons holding tomboy from the default installation
in lenny:
      * The size of the package and its dependencies. There have been
        considerable progress on this matter from the Debian CLI team.
      * The fact that Mono hasn’t been ported to all architectures yet.
        This is now solved by the availability of the stripped down C++
        version (gnote), that is depended on as an alternative. 

I agree that feedback from the CD team would be nice. I’ll ask them to
do a simulation once the GNOME 2.26 metapackages are ready. Anyway
fitting all of this on the first CD is out of question. The primary
package still being gnome-desktop-environment, I guess we should focus
the size efforts on this one and ensure it can still fit on one CD.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'   “I recommend you to learn English in hope that you in
  `-     future understand things”  -- Jörg Schilling

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