Re: langs with tasksel

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

I suspect we should discuss this on debian-edu@lists, to allow more
people to learn how the tasksel stuff work.  Bounced your email there
and send my reply to the list.

[José L. Redrejo Rodríguez]
> Hi, I've been waiting to see you on irc, but I guess your baby is
> stealing much time, so I'm sending you my questions by email so you can
> answer "asynchronously".

Great.  Yeah, there is not much spare time these days. :)

> I've been checking and studing how that stuff works and have some
> questions for you. I guess most of them are due to some lack of
> understanding by my part, but maybe rethinking some of these things we
> might get the key to make it work.
> 
> - why are you using as test script: always-lang or always-laptop
> instead of using the lang or laptop tests that tasksel install?

Because the lang and laptop tests have code to make sure they only can
be true during the first time installation (ie when d-i calls
tasksel).  I wanted something that was true always. :)

> - In the "education-lang-xx" tasks you use list (with an empty
> list).  d-i uses task-fields, with the language-env as key
> package. so why are you doing it that way if the list is empty? is
> it a cdd-dev limitation?

Our tasks are listed in the debian-edu-tasks.desc file, while most
Debian tasks are listed in the Packages file.  We can't modify the
task field in Debian.  This is why I use 'list'.  I use empty language
tasks to try to mimic the way Debian does language specific tasks, to
test the hypothesis that one can only use one of 'test' and 'enhance'
in a task.  It did not help, and later code reading in tasksel make me
suspect that it is possible to use both test-* and enhances-* in the
same task.  If this is so, the education-lang-xx-desktop could include
both instead of only enhances.

> - If all the above is correct, I'm thinking that the
> education-lang-es or education-lang-no are being installed, but as
> they don't install any package we're not noticing it. Do you know if
> there is a way to know if they have been installed?

I'm not aware of any way to notice if an empty task is installed.
Perhaps checking the debconf question value?

> - With the education-lang-xx-desktop tasks, we're saying that they
> enhanced the education-desktop-other & education-lang-es tasks. But
> I don't thin that will work. According to the current
> /usr/share/tasksel/debian-tasks.desc and the poor documentation in
> the tasksel README, it seems that the enhancing should be to tasks
> being part of their name. I.E: education-lang-xx-desktop can enhance
> education-lang-xx , or education-desktop, but not
> education-desktop-other, as "other" is not part of this task name.

Oh.  Was not aware of any such nameing restrictions.  Perhaps that is
the reason why it does not work?

> And finally, what do you think about temporally changing the current
> dvd building script to make a very small dvd to test these things?
> Now, rebuilding the dvd and downloading it takes a long time, just
> to make a small test... Obviously that sould be said in the mail
> list, and done only for a few days. Or do you know a better option
> to quickly test some changes to fix this issue?

Nope, did not find any simple way to test this without a complete
rebuild and a complete d-i installation.  If you announce the test on
the list and IRC, and try to get it over with quickly, I see no
problem with such test.  You could also test using the netinst CD
instead of the DVD.

Hapy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen