Hello, Here are my comments about this interesting discussion. For sure Debian Jr needs kind of classification to allow parents install what is best fit for their children. I agree about the 4 stages of children development, although we do not provide such rigid classification with DoudouLinux. Usually we consider 3 stages because we don't target young teens: * beginners, learning the computer (“babies”) * children not reading, usually below 6-7 years * children reading, then 6-7 to 10-12 or more, we dont care about the upper limit to say the truth With other DoudouLinux contributors we had a discussion 2 years ago about showing target ages in DoudouLinux or not, in order to let parents allow or disallow activities. One of our contributors who is graduated in psychology told that there are too much variations between children to decide for them all what they can do and cannot. Moreover some parents tend to be too much conforming to the classification (“it's for 6 and up, you're only 5.9”), leading to a frustration or even loss of motivation for the computer (which we don't want). So I believe we should rather use “soft” classification, eg. small/middle/big child then teen, or even S, M, L, XL. The second point is the actual age target of apps. I don't think apps are developed with a precise age range in mind but rather a goal for helping children grow, for developing skills. Nevertheless using skills is probably too complicated for a classification while skills may not be all acquired at the same age for every child. So again, a classification probably has to be soft enough (and accept the same app in several classes, eg. Gcompris as said). Finally, just take the place of the parents one minute: you're installing Debian for your kids, what would you like to see in the installer that would ease the customization for them? I bet a list of tasks that allow to quickly: 1. have an idea of the age for which it is supposed to be fit 2. know the kind of apps it is (education, entertainment, music, drawing, etc.) So I agree with the 2 axes classification and think this should be achieved using in main tasks and meta-packages, rather than Debtags in my opinion. But this may not be sufficient. For example one of our concerns is to be able to propose packages sets for low-end machines and for high-end machines, especially because of ARM computers. I don't know if Debian Jr should deal with this because too much choices may sound confusing. For this reason I feel the Debian installer should only show the main choices, ie. small/middle/big child, teen. If parents don't want games, they'll have to go deeper in the Jr packages lists. If they want 3D games, the same. Concerning the selection of packages, I'd like you to know that I've already looked at the current set of Jr. packages, with the intention of merging the DoudouLinux package sets [1] into them. Unfortunately both sets are using different classifications while the selected packages are quite different too… In the end I understood that some preparation work is required before making use of our work in Debian Jr. This is the work you've just started! [1] http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/doudoulinux/live/trunk/config-base/chroot_local-packageslists/ -- Cheers, JM.
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