How to add packages to the Debian Edu DVD

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

Here is a short intro on how to add packages to the Debian Edu DVD.
This assume the package already exist, either in Debian/Etch or in the
Debian Edu APT repository, and that you have svn access to the debian
edu source repository on alioth.debian.org.

 1) Fetch the svn source  tree

     svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-edu/trunk/src

 2) Move to the task package source files

     cd src/debian-edu

 3) Edit the task you want to modify, adding packages (more on this
    later), I use the education-common task as an example.

     emacs tasks/common

 4) Update the package changelog, documenting the change.

     emacs debian/changelog

 5) Check the change, make sure nothing unwanted is modified.

     svn diff

 6) When the change is complete, commit it to svn, with an explanation
    on the change, for example the same description stored in the
    changelog:

     svn commit -m \
       "Depend on openssh-server, to make sure ssh is enabled on all machines"\
       debian/changelog tasks/common

The task files include blocks like this:

  Depends:     procinfo, sysutils
  Why:         Needed to access procinfo for debugging
  Responsible: Petter Reinholdtsen
  NeedConfig:  no

Instead of 'depends', one can use 'recommends', 'suggests', 'ignore'
and 'avoid'.  They affect how the package is included on the DVD and
CDs, and if they are installed by default or not.  The depends,
recommends and suggests are listed in the metapackages.  The packages
listed as depends are included first on the DVD and CDs, and are
installed if the installation system find the packages.  The
recommended packages are included next and installed if found by the
installation system, bur are at the moment unlikely to make it onto
the CDs.  Recommends make it into to DVD.  The suggested packages are
unlikely to make it into the CDs, but make it into the DVD.  They are
not installed by default.  The ignored packages are included on the
DVD, but are not installed.  The avoided packages are excluded from
the DVD and CDs, and thus not installed nor available.

New packages you want to have included should start as ignored
packages, to get them on the DVD but not installed by default.  When
they are found to be useful, we can update them to suggests (to make
them more visible, but not installed by default).  If they are really
useful, possible to preseed and work out of the box, we can move them
to recommend or depend, but before this is done, we need to verify
that the disk space required is available in the default installation.

We are currently using 1.6 GiB of the 4.4 GiB DVD capasity.  The rest
of the DVD content is popular packages according to popcon.debian.org
(so the most commonly used packages are included first).  This mean we
have heap of space available for packages.

I hope this make it easier to help out with updating the package list.
Do not be afraid of listing packages as ignore, to get them on our
radar.

I very much welcome someone making the content of this email available
as some 'getting started' wiki page, after verifying that it make
sense.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen