Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> So I have been following this whole discussion and I would like to
> provide my input to Ole and the blends team.
>
> - adding a new important package to work-around the fact that tasksel
> maintainers were busy/inactive was not a good move. As you all
> noted, the list of blends does not change often enough to warrant
> separate maintenance. And by doing that you circumvented the
> review by the debian-installer team which clearly has made design
> choices to keep the installer simple.
>
> - the tasksel list with or without the blends already grew and can be
> confusing for new users, it should not be shown by default but should
> be offered as an option in all cases. See below for my suggestion.
>
> - trying to keep blends-tasks now because we have no better option on the
> table right now is not a good move either. Had you not circumvented the
> d-i review at the time you introduced blends-tasks, then maybe you could
> have advertised the limitation of tasksel and we could have found sooner
> someone willing to fix this even if nobody in the blends team had the
> required skills...
>
> I'm thus suggesting that blends-tasks should be removed and merged in
> tasksel-data. At the same time, we should fix the installer to bypass
> that confusing tasksel screen that we always get by default.
>
> On Wed, 07 Dec 2016, Philip Hands wrote:
>> It could be much improved by making it more obvious that the heading is
>> a heading. Even if we're unable to stop headings having a checkbox, we
>> could change the text and the hierarchy slightly to be something like
>> this:
>>
>> [ ] === Debian Desktop Environments:
>> [x] ... Gnome
> [...]
>> Would that cheer people up without needing a major rewrite of tasksel?
>
> That would be a good change, yes.
>
> But more importantly, we need to not show that page at all. I would like
> to suggest a first screen:
>
> Install packages for a:
>
> [X] standard desktop
> [ ] standard server
> [ ] minimal server
> [ ] Show me more options
I think that should be a select, rather than a multi-select:
--> standard desktop (will install $DESKTOP) <--
standard server (includes ssh)
other use cases
(or however the UI presents it)
The reason for the extra bits in brackets is that I've always thought
the tasksel menu was hiding just a little too much of what was meant by
the options.
The reason to use "other use cases" is that eventually I think that
option should take you to a blends menu, where the first blend could be
a fake custom ("Custom selection of tasks" or similar) blend that drops
you into tasksel. For now the tasksel menu as it stands will clearly do
the job, and will require least work if left alone.
I think it's better to drop the minimal server option at this level as
people wanting that probably know what they're doing, and will quite
often be preseeding anyway.
In the end, I think it might be worth treating desktop and server as
blends too, to make the logic less messy, but that's probably something
to look into after stretch.
I would hope to have time to work on this -- once I stop running a
temperature with the cold that currently has me sitting in bed.
Cheers, Phil.
--
|)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
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