On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 11:10:47PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > I think it makes as much sense as the existing task packages.
> Existing brokenness is no excuse for new brokenness though. I have gone
> into detail about how the current task system is fubar, and I think I've
> filed bugs on most of the task packages you mention since they should
> not exist.
Here are the assumptions:
* emacs is used and desired by enough people that they should be
able to get it "easily"
* emacs is large and not used by enough people that it should be
easily avoidable in the default install
In both cases, "easily" probably involves not going into dselect or
console-apt or using apt-get by hand.
The conclusion is that there should be some way, using something like
tasksel, to choose whether you want emacs installed or not.
Likewise, there ought to be some way, using something like tasksel, to
choose whether you want an X environment or not, and whether you want
a fancy desktop like Gnome or KDE. Lots of people do want them. Lots of
people don't. They're not exactly "tasks", though.
Would:
[ ] X Desktop (Gnome/KDE)
[ ] Emacs
[ ] Dialup
[ ] Printing
[ ] Laptop
[ ] Russian
[ ] German
[ ] Japanese
[ ] Chinese
[ ] Spanish
[ ] Polish
[ ] Office software (word processing, spreadsheet, etc)
[ ] Desktop Publishing (TeX)
[ ] Database software (Postgresql)
[ ] Science
[ ] Games
[ ] Junior
[ ] C
[ ] C++
[ ] Fortran
[ ] Objectionable C
[ ] Python
[ ] SGML
[ ] Tcl/Tk
[ ] Web Server (Apache)
[ ] Windows Filesharing (Samba)
[ ] DNS Server (bind)
[ ] News Server (INN)
[ ] Cluster node
[ ] Mail Server (IMAP, etc)
...really be unreasonable?
They're not all "tasks" ("I speak Russian", "I want to use Emacs",
"I want pretty little icons, just like Windows", "my computer has a
printer"), and even the ones that are aren't tasks in the same sense
("I want to be able to..." vs "I want my computer to...")
But they're not hard for a user to work through, and they seem likely
to be useful.
(They could be further categorised by naming them like:
task-devel-c
task-lang-polish
task-user-wordprocessing
task-server-dns
task-hardware-dialup
And having tasksel know about the conventions we might use)
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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