Bug#435470: tasksel: Tasks (and distro images) should be created by popcon clustering

[Bart Massey <bart@cs.pdx.edu>]

Package: tasksel
Severity: wishlist

Since popcon submissions are per-user, there is important
information there about the correlations between packages.
This information could easily be used to compute
(automatically, and in a privacy-preserving way) clusters of
packages that are commonly installed together.  This would
provide a set of tasks that is well-adapted to being
installed as a unit.  In particular, these tasks would
presumably include both "vertical" and "horizontal"
components, i.e., things that are associated by similar
function as well as similar underlying userbase.

In addition, clustered tasks would make a nice way
to create customized disk images for offline installs.  The
tasks created by clustering would probably have to be named
by hand; names could be chosen from the existing task names,
or from a whole new set.

    Bart Massey
    bart@cs.pdx.edu