Michael Banck wrote:
> Can you maybe explain what the current status is for those of us who
> haven't installed etch lately and/or ran tasksel?
>
> IIRC Frans Pop said at FOSDEM that some changes for the desktop task
> were implemented since sarge, I don't remember what exactly that was.
> E.g., can users choose between GNOME and KDE now?
The most significant change since sarge is that tasksel will use
heuristics to find machines that look to be likely candidates to run the
desktop task (and the new laptop task), and will default to selecting
the task on those machines. (Obviously it lets this default be
overridden.) This is intended to avoid "my install ends in a black
screen" bug reports from very novice users.
Tasksel had partial support added after sarge for selecting between the
gome-desktop and kde-desktop subtasks via preseeding. This support is a
bit broken and needs to be fixed though. It also allows derived
distributions to pin the selection to one or the other, or even unhide
both sub-tasks to allow maual selection between them.
I don't intend to go much further down that road; I strongly feel that
standard installs should not need to bother the user with this choice[1]. I
have considered various ways to allow expert level installs to make the
choice, including un-hiding the menu items and adding a debconf question
to select between kde and gnome. I spent about 3 hours on that today,
but it's deceptively hard to implement correctly.
I had to disable the kde-desktop task before etch beta 1 due to the
supposedly-nonexistant meta-package issues alluded to in this thread
making it not usable in testing at the time, and I haven't brought it
back yet, so currently users get only gnome. My current plan for
bringing back kde-desktop is to make it available but not pulled in by
the desktop task, so that kde can at least be selected through
preseeding, and so that we avoid the ugliness of installing both DE's
together like sarge does.
I am currently unable to do many full installs of the desktop task to
test it out, and relying on user input to find important missing peices
is very hard, so I am very interested in finding other people to
co-maintain the task.
--
see shy jo
[1] If anyone wants to argue that point, I can probably find about 300
messages on the topic that you'll need to read before you can say
anything new or interesting on the subject.
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