Re: Those task packages

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

(Daniel, see [1] for context.)

Philip Charles wrote:
> > Have you checked for any other partial overlaps with other tasks that
> > are not in the above list?
> 
> c-dev
> chinese-s
> chinese-t
> file-server
> games
> german
> japanese
> korean
> laptop
> mail-server
> polish
> python-dev
> russian
> spanish
> tex

These are all overlaped with? Or you checked these?

> IMHO we need to come up with something for woody.

I take it they're overlaps then. :-(

Oh, locales gets us likely unusable[2] korean, chinese-t, russian, spanish,
japanese, german, chinese-s, and polish tasks, so we definitly need to
come up with something.

> Only one representative package needs to be marked, provided that foo is
> the only task in the Task: field.  eg asiya24-vfont for japanese,
> doc-linux-pl for polish, inn2 for news-server etc.  These will not be
> found on the first CD unless the task has be specifically nominated. 
> Something like "Task: foo master" for these packages?  AFAIK, the Task:
> field only occurs in the Packages file and not the package's control, so
> it should not be difficult to implement, mind you I have not really
> investigated this.  Some hacking of tasksel and a modification to how the
> Packages files are built would be needed. 

Rather than changing what is in the packages files, we can just change
tasksel and aptitude. There is another source of information that both
already read, that is in tasksel. (I'm not sure if doint it this way is
the cleanest way, but it is the simplest.)

What seems easiest to do for now is add a new Essential: line to the
task files, so they will look like this:

Task: laptop
Section: user
Description: laptop system
 This is a collection of tools that laptop users will expect to find on a
 system.
Essential:
 apmd
 pcmcia-cs
Packages:
 apmd
 pcmcia-cs
 anacron
 netenv
 irda-tools
 irda-common
 toshutils
 noflushd

Until aj's override scripts are updated, the contents of Essentual will
have to remain duplicated in Packages.

/usr/share/tasksel/debian-tasks.desc will be updated to include the
Essential: fields, and tasksel and aptitude modified to read in that
field and use it in limiting the displayed tasks. 

I can probably make all the necessary modifications to tasksel tomorrow.
(I've done a first cut at adding Essential: fields to all tasks tonight.)
Updating aptitude is not release critical.

-- 
see shy jo

[1] In summary, the debian CD images include some packages that are part
    of some tasks, but not all, since they are subsets of the debian
    archive. It's very likely that if you only have CD #1, aptitude and
    tasksel will say you have a number of tasks available, of which crucial
    parts might be missing. desktop without an X server, for instance.
    This *might* be ok in aptitude, it's horrid in tasksel though.
[2] Maybe a few are usable, I'm sure the chinese ones won't be w/o
    chinese terminals and input support, for example.