Hi all I've been in the last week speaking with some of you about updating the education metapackages. From our Linex experience we have been dealing with similar packages (we call them linexedu-whatever (http://linexedu.educarex.es ). We have a lot of feedback and suggestions from the teachers that use them at schools, so we have thought it could be one of the best ways to begin our collaboration with Debianedu, apporting some of that experience for the project. Some days ago, at Edinburgh in Debconf7, we had the chance of interchange some opinions about this topic, and from that experience I've prepared this message. There are three goals we would like to get with these packages: - For the current development release using etch: just update them to be sure that they contain the best educative packages that are already in Debian. That should be easy to be done and shouldn't delay the release as won't change the internal packages. For the selection I've removed from the recommends section all the applications that don't have a GUI, as usually teachers and students don't like/use that kind of apps, unless they are hackers. These changes add a bunch of packages that increase the size of the final dvd. Using a DVD to distribute DebianEdu should not be a problem, but if a CD is going to be used, there are too many changes and they should be reduced to remove obsolete software and change it by newest applications, but not adding new ones. - For the lenny release: - Split some of the metapackages and add some new ones. - Add diversions to the desktop menu files. That's we have been doing for the last four years in Linex and make things easier to teachers and students. The idea is really simple, but we think is effective: all the educative packages have there icons under the "Education" branch in the menu. Using an example: installing qucs (a powerful electronic circuits simulator) you get a menu entry under the Electronics or Other branch menu. Installing education-electronics will move the menu entry to Education/Electronics. Using dpkg-divert the next upgrades of the package won't change this situation and removing education-electronics will revert the menu entry to its original branch. In that way, teachers will find easily the applications that apply to their topics. Please, take a look to the attached document. All the feedback, specially from teachers, is really welcome. As I wanted to send this information a.s.a.p. I have only studied the most "educative" metapackages, so I haven't touched yet the workstation, kde-desktop, etc. metapackages. That's why they have a grey background in the document. Regards José L. P.S. the list for the current situation is taken from the debian/control file, not from the tasks.
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