Re: Tasks policy
On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 02:54:59PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Remember: the point of tasks is to make the initial install simpler,
> so that people can get started on Debian without having to wade through
> dselect.
>
> So it's not a problem if *nothing* other than tasksel can handle
> installing and removing tasks elegantly yet. It's unlikely dpkg or apt-get
> will handle tasks directly ever, but perhaps some of the frontends (deity
> or dselect) will eventually. If you want to hack on this at some point,
> that's fine, but getting tasks to work for their primary goal is much
> more important right now.
Totally agreed and understood!
My thought was simply that it would be easier for people to make sense
of if they could just look at the control file of one package
(task-foo) rather than searching through the control files of all
packages.
But again, you have working code, so the point is somewhat moot.
> Task: headers are more akin to Section: headers than Recommends:. Both in
> that people really ought to be able to just uninstall a package if they
> don't like it, and in that the complexity of dependency specifications
> just isn't warranted. It's quite reasonable, for example, to try
> to setup a mail server (with SMTP and POP and IMAP and maybe even a
> webmail application, say) and then decide you'd like to replace exim
> with postfix, eg.
Sort of agreed, which was why I said that it must have a different set
of rules. Remember that the Task: header will be under the control of
a strictly limited number of packages.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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