etch netinst tasksel "standard system" (was Re: RAID1 Boot Partition)

[Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu>]

Just to update an old thread and scratch an itch...

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 02:05:18PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > 4. you can rerun tasksel and pick the standard system from there.
> 
> Is "Standard System" one of the options when running tasksel again?  I
> don't see it there.

I've done a couple of etch installs using a recent netinst cd, and
noticed the "standard system" option in the install tasksel step,
and also saw that it does not show up when running tasksel later. The
install docs don't seem to describe this option very well, other than
this statement:

  http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apds02.html.en
  ...
  A standard installation for the i386 architecture, including all
  standard packages and using the default 2.6 kernel, takes up 353MB
  of disk space. A minimal base installation, without the "Standard
  system" task selected, will take 225MB.

Browsing the source, /usr/bin/tasksel, shows that selecting "standard
system" ends up running aptitude with a set of search selectors, 
something like:

  aptitude --without-recommends -y install ~pstandard ~prequired ~pimportant

The ~p search term matches the package priority information, and
apparently all search terms must match (i.e., there's an implicit 'and'
between them).

The search subcommand can be used to list those packages:

  aptitude search ~pstandard ~prequired ~pimportant

though it's still not clear what is really added in this step, since
some of the packages were presumably installed during part of the
base install.   I might do another install without this option and
see what the difference is...

Ken

-- 
Ken Irving, fnkci+debianuser@uaf.edu