A bug in debian, but i don't know which package
I have been playing with Xfce desktop environment. I have been
using gnome under Lenny and when I decided to investigate Xfce
an also decided not to mess with my working Gnome installation,
so I prepared a new partition and used my netinstall CD to install a
complete Xfce system there. This is not the first time I have
installed Debian, so everything went pretty smoothly and shortly I had
an Xfce system up and running and looking like the screen shots
on the web, but...
It didn't seem to have a way to mount memory sticks like I had
become used to under Gnome, particularly the automatic creation
of a mount-point in /media using the volume label for the name.
As I played more with Xfce, the feature appeared and worked, then
would disappear. This over hours and days and numberous reboots
as I looked into other things. I finally determined, to my satisfaction,
that the hal package was needed to make the feature work. (To guess
that hal is needed, does not require great smarts, but to determine
that it was the only thing that was missing was tedious.)
Anyway, I think that hal should be included in the Xfce install that
is burnt into the netinstall CD. I know that Xfce is an avowedly
minimalist environment, but the Debian install version of Xfce is
definately not minimal. So it seems to me that this package was simply
overlooked when configuring tasksel, but maybe not.
What is the package that determines what gets put into the tasksel for
each of the different environments? I'd like this to get on a to-do
list for the up-coming Squeeze netinstall CD.
An afterthought: Why does tasksel continue to exist and be used?
I know of no way to look up what will be installed before I ask
commit to a run of tasksel. If I try something and there is a disaster,
I have very little to go on to try to clean up the mess. But the
apt system and aptitude are very helpful in avoiding serious errors.
The developers who configure tasksel for various situations surely
know how to write package dependency lists. If special packages of
packages for various popular cibfugurations were written, then people
like me could use aptitude to determine what goes into a big, messy
thing like a fully configured desktop environment.
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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