Bug#532515: on making decisions vs letting things happen
(Adding d-cd to CCs.)
On Sunday 05 July 2009, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le samedi 04 juillet 2009 à 16:46 -0400, Joey Hess a écrit :
> > * After stable was released, many more maintainers began assuming
> > recommends would be installed by default. These recommends had to be
> > manually noticed and tracked in tasksel. IIRC there was a case where
> > the omission of a recommended package could have potentially left X
> > nearly unusable. (Don't remember the details.)
[...]
> > At this point it became clear to me that
> > it was time to make tasksel install recommends by default, since
> > manually tracking them in tasks wasn't feasable going forward[2].
> >
> > * At that point, I reviewed packages that were only in task lists
> > due to being recommended, and removed them. This had a nice benefit
> > in simplifying the gnome-desktop task[1].
[...]
> I agree that feedback from the CD team would be nice. I’ll ask them to
> do a simulation once the GNOME 2.26 metapackages are ready. Anyway
> fitting all of this on the first CD is out of question. The primary
> package still being gnome-desktop-environment, I guess we should focus
> the size efforts on this one and ensure it can still fit on one CD.
The first full DVD needs to be considered too. It's supposed to support
installing all four desktop environments without the use of a mirror.
In general debian-cd may need to be modified as AFAIK currently it does
not consider Recommends at all when deciding which packages to include on
which CD. It might be an option to extend d-cds functionality in such a
way that Recommends do get considered, but only _after_ dependencies for
all tasks relevant for a CD/DVD set.
I must say that I'm not at all sure that the change to include Recommends
wasn't done prematurely or too lightly. It is quite likely to also affect
the server tasks in quite a big way and could have a major impact on the
contents of CD images if not handled correctly.
I also wonder what impact it will have on the total installed size of the
different desktop environments and server tasks as documented in the
manual. Quite likely testing task installs in emulators will be a bigger
pain than it already is and the "available space" check in tasksel for
the desktop task will probably need adjustment (4GB instead of the
current 3GB?).
One option could of course be to not change d-cds functionality at all and
only install Recommends if available (either from additional CDs or a
mirror), which does seem to fit its purpose.
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