Hello Debian-Jr, Debian-Med and Debian-Edu people, The Debian-Lex mailing list just opened last week, but I would like to draw from the experience of our related sub-projects and get some ground-rules sorted out before we make too many irreversible decisions. Debian-Jr (which I'll use as an example, being the first) has: * A task called "Debian-Jr" that installs a bunch of metapackages * A bunch of metapackages depending on various packages, some of which are specifically packaged for Debian-Jr and some not * A bunch of packages whose names begin with junior-* * (Not yet implemented) A group that a Debian-Jr user should be added to in order to enable customised menus and maybe other features * A documentation package regarding installation of the system Have I left anything much out? I am wondering whether this is still the best way to approach it. In particular, although the task "Debian-Jr" installs a base Debian-Jr system, in order to install additional packages you have to manually go through the list of packages and look for packages that begin with the prefix "junior-". This seems clunky and difficult. With the new package tags system (although not integrated into the installer yet), we can presumably do away with this. We may well still have a task that would install a base Debian-Lex system, but for additional or alternative packages we would run a tags browser which (by default) would filter for packages with the "legal" tag, and offer the users sub-tags that they could use for further filering or grouping (these would replace the metapackages that Debian-Jr uses now). Or, we could go further than that, and do away with a task altogether, and *just* use package tags. What do people think is the best way to go? Also, does anyone feel that there should be a separate installer that installs Debian-Lex by default instead of just Debian? That way, we can hand it to a user and say "Here is a Debian-Lex CD" rather than "Here is a Debian CD, and here is some documentation about how to use it to install Debian-Lex". Ideally, this ought to just involve a simple change to Debian Installer or boot-floppies, without the need to change anything else in the main distribution (a la Knoppix). Logically, all the meta-distributions ought to collaborate on this. -- JEREMY MALCOLM <Jeremy@Malcolm.id.au> Personal: http://www.malcolm.id.au Providing online networks of Australian lawyers (http://www.ilaw.com.au) and Linux experts (http://www.linuxconsultants.com.au) for instant help! Disclaimer: http://www.terminus.net.au/disclaimer.html. GPG key: finger.
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