I was bored on the plane back from DebConf4, so I rewrote tasksel. The new version uses debconf to ask the question about tasks. I also tightended up the criteria for tasks, which involved removing quite a few. And I made it automatically install a language task to match the language the user used for the install. The language task selection feature is actually more general, now we can have tasks that are automatically installed, or removed from the list of tasks, depending on the result of a test script. I hope to find more uses for this later, for example a laptop task could be installed if a test indicates the machine is a laptop. Or the desktop task could be hidden (and perhaps a new "lightweight desktop" task displayed) if there is not enough disk space, CPU, or memory. This also required some base-config changes, since the new tasksel has a item at the end of the task list for manual package selection. So base-config can stop asking the user if they want to use aptitude or tasksel, and just run tasksel, which will then run aptitude if desired. I've just committed the tasksel changes to subversion (in branches/newtasksel), and uploaded it to experimental. I do not anticipate uploading this to unstable until the rc1 of d-i has been released, and until some more testing with base-config and fresh installs. I also need to find a way to keep this from breaking CDDs (like debian-edu), and don't plan to release it until that is also sorted out. I've not bothered to commit the base-config changes yet as they're mostly untested, and not very interesting. There are new strings in the new tasksel, and I hope translators can have a go at getting them translated. Sorry that I had to put it in a branch, which will make your lives more difficult. I think many users will find the new UI for tasksel to be more consistent and easier to use, and the new abbreviated task list to be less confusing. DebConf was a bit of an eye-opener WRT the old tasksel's usability. Of course there is still bug #252751, which makes the new UI less intuitive than it could be. Any newt hackers? Oh yeah, the new version of tasksel weighs in at only 269 lines of code, about 1/10th of its old size. :-) -- see shy jo
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