Re: Installation Profiles
Jonathan P Tomer <phouchg@cif.rochester.edu> writes:
>a possibility i considered: divide user-space...packages into
>heirarchical groups (structure identical or similar to the debian
>menus, possibly?). have a level wherein the user selects any of these
>he wants; it will be easy to skip those things he obviously doesn't
>want (i can safely skip Applications/Ham-Radio and such things).
The difficulty with this is coming up with groups that can be easily
*excluded*. Sure, you can dispense with "hamradio". However, you
can't exclude something like "text". If you are installing a business
system, you might think you could eliminate "games". However, you
would be missing fortune. Also typist. For some systems, you could
eliminate "devel". In general, I expect that you couldn't eliminate
more than 10 or 20 percent of any complete list of subjects.
I suggest that we should offer several orthogonal ways to eliminate
packages, such as:
- subject, as above.
- things that require X.
- non-free.
- language. The user should be able to specify a primary and
secondary language, so everything else gets skipped.
There are probably some more. Even if each one only eliminates 10
percent, they start to add up. However, the package selection tool
has to let you specify all the criteria up front. Otherwise, you wind
up reviewing the 90 percent that with possibly interesting subjects
*plus* the 90 percent that are main+contrib *plus* the 90 percent that
are not foreign language... which means you see most of the packages
several times.
>any dependencies are autoselected, so i don't have to spend hours
>looking through libweird-2.3, libweird-2.3-dev, libweird2.3-dbg,
>libweird2.3-doc, libweird4.2, libweird4.2-dev, libweird4.2-dbg,
>libweird4.2-doc, ad infinitum (or at least ad nauseam).
Yes!
- Jim Van Zandt
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