Re: re-categorizing
On Sat, 14 Mar 2009, ter wrote:
- I totally agree with you in that the server/desktop categorization
might not be very useful for a law office.
I thought of some qualifications to this afterwards. I think the
categories are not going to map 1-1 into metapackages. For each
category, there would be at least two metapackages, one for servers, and
one for desktop/client machines. I haven't digested the whole blends
idea, but I see no reason why metapackages should not have large
overlaps.
This does perfectly fit my opinion of metapackages. I raised
this issue on Debian Science (see for instance [1]). The important
thing is to support our users. A specific user wants to solve a
certain task (and thus installs a certain metapackage). The
question whether some Dependencies are also mentioned in a different
metapackage is completely useles for this task. So in fact we do
*not* build a categorisation tree but build pools of useful software
for certain tasks which can definitely have overlaps.
The metapackages are "weighless", so to speak, they are just
declaring dependencies between packages (+other things), to ease
selection/installation. So if it makes sense to distinguish between
laywers/paralegals/support with regard to say
Loggin/Tracking/Calendaring, then there would be 4 metapackages for that
category (naming syntax may not be correct)
LoggingTrackingCalendaring_server
LoggingTrackingCalendaring_lawyer
LoggingTrackingCalendaring_paralegal
LoggingTrackingCalendaring_support
Each of these metapackages may depend more or less on the same debian
packages, but their configurations will not be the same, but
co-ordinated so as to serve that category of function for the entire law
practice. I have a sneaky feeling that this may be what "roles" are
about, but I haven't read it yet :b
Well, I'm no law expert and can not really comment on this. From
a general metapackage building point of view I'd say these are
quite specific things (and a little bit large package names).
If I'm not missleaded we have a certain task LoggingTrackingCalendaring
(I'd seek for a shorter name) and roles who are doing this task. The
only blend which might have similar needs for the role who is working
on this task might be Debian Edu with the roles student and teacher -
they are using a common set of applications but might have different
configurations.
I have no suggestion for a general implementation but in principle I
would tackle this task the following way:
Have a common metapackage lex-config.
Handle a set of configuration options for the different roles.
When installing the other metapackages do setup according to the
roles in lex-config.
If I'm not missleaded debian-edu is doing this somehow like this.
Would you say "evidence management" is more important for what we in the
US call "criminal law"? In any case, it got dropped mainly because I was
thinking "civil law", and did not want to deal with it. So it will be
added back to the proposal.
Well, IMHO every category that has at least a set of *existing*
packages which are needed in this field make sense.
I think "legal research" is a category for lawyers because that is what
lawyers do, but not one for the project of debian-lex, because I believe
we will not see software packages that can do "legal research".
See above. We do not need "fake" categories to pretend we have thought
about things but can not really provide any help. I'd call this
vapourware.
Kind regards
ANdreas.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2009/03/msg00030.html
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