Hello world,
For woody, it'd be nice if we could use the Priority field consistently.
What do people think of something like:
required
-- Essential packages and things they depend on. If you
remove these (and don't replace them with something
equivalent, like mawk with gawk say), your system's
probably not recoverable.
important
-- Minimally functional system, basic command line utilities
only. ping. apt-get. nvi.
standard
-- Basically functional character mode system. Mail reader
(mutt), web browser (lynx). Everything installed on every
system, at least until they go out of their way to get
rid of it.
common (new)
-- Everything that can be installed without going into
dselect. Emacs, TeX, X, Gnome, KDE, Abiword, whatever.
All the task- packages.
optional
-- Everything else people might reasonably be interested in
extra
-- Things people probably aren't interested in; that are
obsolete, require special hardware, etc
It could be used something like:
* nothing in optional or above can conflict
* everything in standard and above can get automatically installed
(which dselect tends to like) without annoying too many people
(which emacs, TeX and X probably all tend to do)
* task-* and similar packages can only depend on common and above
* common and above can all be installed simultaneously, making it
fairly easy to test that all the tasks and such can at least be
installed
* "base" becomes essentially required+important and any extra
things that not every system needs (like ppp and pcmcia).
One problem: emacs. It's probably a good thing not to have it blithely
installed on every system (in which case it shouldn't be "standard"),
but it's probably also a good thing to have it be easy to get to (since
it is pretty popular), but it doesn't really seem to fit into the "task"
philosophy either, so it's not clear how you could say "hey i do want
emacs, actually", without waiting 'til the end and running apt-get.
So maybe it needs to stay as standard afterall. :)
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
-- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001
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