Andreas Tille <andreas@fam-tille.de> writes: > Hi Bdale, > > On Tue, 06 Dec 2016 08:10:37 -0700 Bdale Garbee wrote: >> the first piece of advice I give most new-to-Debian users I'm helping out >> personally is to just ignore the concept of tasks and pick software they >> actually want on their system. > > To solve this very problem we actually invented the tasks in Blends: It > simply helps picking the software users want on their system without > browsing the n (insert number of binary packages here) descriptions > using tools a newcomer is not even aware about. > > I'm aware that the target user group I have in mind and who thanked me > for the easy way to install their packages is quite small amongst all > users of Debian. On the other hand Debian is quite popular in this > target user group compared to other distributions and this is because we > provide explicit care for this user group. Could we serve their needs with an extra debian-installer/blend preseed to deal with this, probably aliased as just 'blend' so that one could type something like: <TAB>blend=med<RETURN> when booting the default media to get the desired result? If we then made the ISOs easy to tweak, so that the default option on the Debian-Med ISOs included blend=med on the command line by default, would that actually be better than what we have, and also allow us to drop the problematic tasksel items? By easy to tweak, I mean making sure that there's enough room in the menu files so that one could edit the ISO file directly and populate the blend=... setting somehow. Failing that, it's definitely possible to rebuild the images, and also tell people about typing TAB and the 'blend=...' bit if they want to install using standard Debian media. I don't think that would take much to implement, and would not be adding translatable strings to d-i, so might even be possible to do for stretch (well, the preseed bit anyway) If that scratches the itch, we could then drop the extra stuff from the tasksel menu. It also occurs to me that if we make sure that the handling of debian-installer/blend were able to deal with pulling in extra udebs, as one would need to in order to deal with blend=edu, one could have a new udeb for asking about all the blends we know about, and pull that in with something like blend=blends -- then if someone wants to be presented with a vast menu of blends to choose from that can be done without annoying normal users. There could be an option for "Prompt me for all blends" in the Advanced Menu, or we could just expect people to type blend=blends and/or produce a "Blend-tastic!" variant of the install media. If there's a real use case for mixing multiple blends, one could separate them with ; as we do elsewhere, so: blend=med;ham;games (we might want to call it 'blends' in that case, but I think that might be over-complicating things) Does that sound like it might be worth looking into? Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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