Re: master meta-package
On Thu, 2006-03-02 at 01:28 -0500, Charles Fry wrote:
> First of all, let me express my thanks for the fine work which has
> resulted in the current junior-* packages. They have proven to be most
> helpful.
>
> My big complaint is that it is a lot of work to install all of the
> current meta pacakges. Is there any reason why there isn't a single
> master metapackage that depends on all of the others, for those of us
> who want to install junior-*, not only now but also tracking all new
> junior-* in the future?
Yes, there is. It used to be that the packages were collected together
under into a "task" which was installable by tasksel. However, because
of the great size of Debian Jr. it would not all fit on the first Debian
install CD, which is a condition for being included in tasksel. Besides
which, metapackages are fragile: if one dependency cannot be satisified,
the whole metapackage is uninstallable. A master meta-package would
exacerbate that problem by allowing a solitary unsatisfiable dependency
block upgrades. In a stable distribution, we can resolve such problems,
but it would make things very difficult for testing/unstable users.
Since, in spite of the number of years Debian Jr. has been around, it is
still considered to be a beta CDD, it is undesirable to cause such
difficulty for the testing/unstable users, who form a significant
percentage of the user population, for such a small gain in convenience
for the stable users.
My recent proposals concerning debtags will address this problem
directly by giving the user a way to make arbitrary selections of Debian
Jr. packages, either the whole of them, or any subset, depending on the
user's criteria. The details of implementation are still open for
discussion, but I believe we already have sufficient tools so that a
simple script could be made (with a GUI front-end if desired) to give us
back tasksel-like functionality, only using debtags for selection
instead of metapackages.
As to keeping up-to-date with new additions to Debian Jr., I think we
need to use an apt hook of some sort to ensure that our debtags
selections get applied to each update. I welcome discussion & code in
support of this idea.
Ben
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