Re: Task installability and britney

[Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org>]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 19:42:09 +0100, Philipp Kern wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 04:31:51PM -0000, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> > In order to ensure that packages marked as "key" for a task remain present
> > and installable in testing, britney uses a generated "faux" package which
> > depends on each of the packages. This approach has, with the odd minor
> > niggle, worked fine for some time but breaks down as soon as the set of
> > packages involved are not completely coinstallable; this is now the case
> > due to the gnome-desktop task indirectly depending on gdm3, and the xfce
> > and lxde desktop tasks depending on gdm. The net effect is that the faux
> > package becomes useless for the purpose of determining installability of
> > the set of key packages, as it is itself uninstallable.
> 
> I think the non-coinstallability of the tasks should be fixed.  Why do they
> *depend* on a display manager after all?  That means that you cannot use those
> metapackages on multiuser setups where you have to choose your desktop manager
> wisely (because it needs to get along with all DEs installed).
> 
The metapackages don't depend on the display manager, the *-desktop
tasks do.  I don't think it would make sense for a user to choose
'graphical desktop environment' in d-i and not end up with a display
manager.

Cheers,
Julien