Bug#846002: blends-tasks must not be priority:important (was Re: Bug#846002: Lowering severity)
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
You only see "tasksel" if you check the "Show me more options" which
should be unchecked by default. There's code that translates each option
into default selections at the tasksel level.
For instance, if you check "standard desktop" (checked by default like
currently, then it enables the "GNOME" task (or whatever was set in the
"desktop" kernel command line option) and the "standard installation".
If you check standard server, then you get "standard" + "ssh".
If you check minimal server, then you get only "ssh".
If you select "Show me more options", you can see the effect of each
option as you have some tasks already selected.
If we do that, then IMO it's fine if the tasksel screen is also cluttered
with blends.
Christian and Cyril, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think that if
we come up with a patch implementing the above, we could get it in
stretch? What would be the last delay to come up with such a patch?
Anyone up for the challenge?
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
Learn to master Debian: http://debian-handbook.info/get/
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