Bug#846002: blends-tasks must not be priority:important (was Re: Bug#846002: Lowering severity)

[Ole Streicher <olebole@debian.org>]

Hi Philip,

On 06.12.2016 20:43, Philip Hands wrote:
> 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?

I think this is really unergonomic, since people need to understand or
remember installer boot time options. Boot prompt options are magic for
many users, and they need to read the documentation to get this.

And it is not recoverable: imagine that someone forgets to put it there
or made a typo, he cannot go back and change this -- he has to go
through the full installation process again.

And it does not really *present* the blends to the user; he already
needs to know what is there.

> 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?

Since I already answered this, I hope it is OK to just copy my old
argument here:

I am not convinced that it is a good solution: First, it multiplies the
whole image creation process by the number of blends. If we have 10
official architectures and (let's say) 5 blends to be included there,
they would then have to manage 60 images instead of 10, with all the
requirements that come out of this (installer manual, web page, updates,
web space etc.).

But it also gives a wrong sign: Debian Pure Blends are by definition
integral part of Debian itself. But even now, this is hard to understand
for many people -- questions like "what is the difference between Debian
Astro and Debian" are quite common, even in front of a poster describing
exactly that. With having separate official images for all blends,
people would even be more confused. As an example, I would take the
Ubuntu approach of having "Ubuntu", "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. instead of
installation options -- people usually think that they have to
re-install the system if they want to switch from one flavour to the
other. Having similar experience with Debian would be bad for the
reputation of the Blends, and for Debian in general.

Best regards

Ole