Re: cleaning up our task packages
Brian Frederick Kimball <bfk@footbag.org> writes:
BFK> At 03:29 pm -0700 on December 07, 2000, John Galt wrote:
JG> DANGER WILL ROBINSON! If a task-* package only installs one package, it
JG> sounds like the package description isn't being clear enough in the
JG> package to be installed.
BFK>
BFK> A clear description is useless to a user that doesn't have the
BFK> time and patience to sift through 6,000 other descriptions to
BFK> find it. The whole point is to let the user browse through a
BFK> small collection of tasks instead of 6,000 poorly categorized
BFK> package descriptions. If a task only requires one package, so be
BFK> it.
Yes, but I can easily go into dselect, type '/imap', and look through
a total of eight packages with 'imap' in their name and find the two
IMAP daemons. (*Especially* when one of the two on my potato machine
is named 'imap'. How much easier does it get?)
Task packages are *not* targeted towards people wanting to run a
specialized server, or people wanting to do random development.
They're targeted towards finding common things people would want to do
just to get started. I'd doubt a beginning user knows about IMAP, or
they might know that their ISP uses it and so installs the IMAP task
because they think they'll need it for that (when what they really
need is an IMAP-capable mail client). IMHO having task packages for
foo-language development or arcane servers isn't useful; people who
need that functionality know/want to know how to use the packaging
system, and probably tend to actually care what particular
incarnations of particular packages get installed.
(The one exception to this, in my mind, is that it'd probably be
useful to have a task-devel package which installs gcc and gdb and
binutils and friends, and possibly dpkg-dev, too; in fact, something
quite along the lines of what build-essential installs. Hrm.)
--
David Maze dmaze@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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