We're still having much trouble getting the education-* packages into testing. The next release of tasksel will have some features that could let us use it instead of task packages, and avoid these problems. Here's how it could work: - debian-edu installations install a education-tasks package, or similar. - This provides a /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc, which lists the debian-edu tasks. - Also a /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/debian-edu program. That program would be responsible for outputting a list of packages to install as part of a task. - With the above files in place, tasksel would be able to display and install debian-edu tasks. - We could also include a /usr/lib/tasksel/tests/debian-edu, which would be used to tell tasksel which debian-edu tasks to automatically install, based on /etc/debian-edu/config. - debian-edu-install would be changed to let tasksel run during base-config. The debconf priority would prevent tasksel from being seen, but it would install all the appropriate packages from debian-edu tasks just as it does for other Debian tasks. This would solve the problem of education-* task packages dependencies keeping them out of testing, since we'd no longer have such packages. The implementation of /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/debian-edu could just cat out predetermined lists of packages for a task at first, but if we later wanted to make it use debtags or something more sophisticated, we'd have the flexability to do that. Another nice benefit is that we could make the education-laptop task be automatically installed if the Debian laptop task was installed (the Debian laptop task will soon be automatically installed on all laptops). The disadvantages are mostly related to not being able to apt-get install education-whatever. We would need to deal with upgrades in some other way. Perhaps we would still include education-* packages, but rather than depending on everything in the task, they could just be installed as part of it, and be used to add new packages during upgrades. Another area of complication is getting the package lists for the CD. Simply adding the education-* packages to the CD would not do it anymore (if it ever really did). The new tasksel has a facility to list the set of packages in a task, and I will probably hook this into debian-cd. -- see shy jo
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