Blends integration into the Debian Installer
Hi all,
in the alpha-6 relase of the debian installer, blends can selected for
the first time directly during installation [1]. This was implemented by
adding a blends-dev/debian-blends-tasks.desc file on a place where the
"tasksel" step can find it.
However, this causes a lot of discussion: the common complaint is that
it adds too much complexity to the "Software selection" step of the
installer [2]. My hope here is that the compromise would be to move the
blends selection onto a separate step that can be enabled by
f.e. checkbox on the first "Software selection" screen.
The other complaint is about the way the task are selected: currently,
all tasks of a blend are selected, with an opt-out possibility, and all
the blends we have on the web page are included. The first one is
questioned [3], and changing the behauivour to opt-in will remove those
blends who do not do this step. IMO we should discuss these aspects (how
the integration is to be done, and how the selection of tasks is done)
in the two mentioned bugs.
However, there is a third aspect that came up with the discussion in [3],
and also appeared in a discussion with NeuroDebian: Some blends have the
requirement not just to install a "default" package selection but to
have a more detailed choice.
I must say that I have no idea how we ge this implemented in the current
situation (especially the discussion in [2]) -- in my opinion the
maximal compromise for the installer we can reach is to have *one*
option per blend. So this mail is to ask the blends on
* what are their requirements to be listed in the default installation
image?
* can they live with just *one* option as a compromise?
* if not: what needs to be done to get your requirement into the
installer?
For Debian-Astro, I can (unsurprisingly) state that having one checkbox
only is a compromise that works. What about the others?
I think we should somehow come up with an agreement on how we want to
see the blends presented in the (default) installer.
Best regards
Ole
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2016/05/msg00004.html
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/758116
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/825004
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