Re: Task packages (was Re: Ignoring dependance on "important" packages?)

[Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>]

I don't know why we need all this complexity.  I reject the notion of
autogenerating my-foo packages, the need for some special mechanism
for task packages to interact with the package manager, etc.

Lets unpack a little bit.  You have 'tasks' which are just ways of
"bundling" bunch of packages together so users don't have to hunt
through the > 3000 packages in Debian for common tasks.  Sure they are
inflexible in that the user might get some pacakges he doesn't need.
My presumption is that this is an acceptable comprimise.  If a user
wants to remove a package that a task depends on, naturally, they are
graduating from being a newbie task-using user to a seasoned user;
they just remove the task and whatever packages they don't want.

This is ok because the whole presupposition IMHO is that tasks are
just for helping new users make sense of the thousands of packages in
Debian.  Once the user has made sense of it themselves and knows
exactly what packages they want and which they don't; then they don't
need tasks anymore, *by* *definition*.

Regarding the issue of "autoconfiguring the X Window System" issue,
that has nothing to do with tasks; that's simply a case where we need
an X configurator package that is able to query the user (or
automatically determine) which X server is needed, and then mark the
package for installation and help them configure it (dpkg
--set-selection serves perfectly well here).  This has nothing to do
with tasks.

Autogenerated (on the user machine) metapackages would not work well
in practice for users, I am quite sure!

--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>