Re: Every second year we are talking about a proper installer
Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> writes:
> I'd like to attract your attention onto bug #758116 which is requesting
> a sensible selection of Blends tasks right from the installer.
I have been looking into this a bit and think I have a (compromise)
solution.
The main problem with tasksel is that it is based on debconf that has a
very limited user interface. Basically, it can just show a list where
one can select one or more items. This makes it impossible to have a
detailed selection of all available blends with all their tasks -- the
list would just get far too long: we have currently ~270 tasks in our
blends!
So, I would propose the following: At installation time, we include for
every blend (that wants to be there) one selectable item. Selecting this
item will install
* the "tasks" package of this blend
* all available tasks (or a subset of them? to be discussed)
When starting tasksel at run time, the list will then include a list of
available tasks for the selected blend(s).
To do this technically, we could create a new package with "Priority:
important" that just contains the tasks list. This package would then
get installed with the base system and available for tasksel at
installation time (right?). This way, the blends team would keep control
over the included blends and would not need to file a bug against
tasksel every time we want to adjust this.
Does anyone veto the creation of such a package?
We would also need to create an additional metapackage for each blend,
containing all its tasks (or a blends defined subset). Such a task would
anyway be nice to enable a "one-stop install" with apt, f.e. with "apt
install astro-all".
This proposed way to present the blends in the Debian installer is very
limited for sure - volunteers are definitely welcome here. I'd take it
as "better-than-nothing" however.
Following the bug, we should decide which blends should be presented
there. For a few, it seems obivous to me:
* Debian Astro
* Debian Med
* Debian GIS
* Hamradio
* Debian EzGo
* DebiChem (?)
* Debian Games (?)
I'd rather not include Debian Science -- I would see no user base for it
as a whole (and we can only use a single default install). What about
Debian Junior? Debian Multimedia?
And there are a few blends, that don't have tasks lists: Debian Design,
FreedomBox, DebianParl.
And, finally, there is NeuroDebian which I guess could be included, but
this would require some input from them.
Best regards
Ole
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