Re: cleaning up our task packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@master.debian.org>]

Interesting timimg :)  

I finally got a go-ahead from the previous task-science maintainer to adopt
his package, which I found muddled (and buggy where it intersected with some
of my packages). I posted a suggestion for a new one to d-devel last night,
and so far only heard "break it up further into task-numerical-analyis and
task-data-analysis".

I'm of a divided opinion. I think Joey is right in limiting tasksel at its
most basic level to just one "screen" (mind you that could be 60 odd rows
these days :) though we should limit it to 20), but I also see good reasons
to offer more granularity for those who can deal with it. Think of it as
"novice" and "intermediate".

As a crude hack, couldn't we define tasksel to do the following

- accept task packages matching task-(.*)(-.*)?    (in Perl regexp)

- in novice mode, only show up to level task-(.*) and have $1 define the
  groupings, eg task-programming, task-webserver, ...
  
- in intermediate mode, go to level $1 and $2 and show eg "C Programming"
  based on task-programming-c, "C++ Programming" based on task-programming-c++
  etc 
  
How does that sound?   The fact remains that we have a _vast_ number of
packages so that we probably need to define several "viewing modes" for them.

Dirk
  
  

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.