On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 11:20, Michael Banck wrote: > Why? Either you run a CDD(!) and want to have the stuff installed, or > you don't. Well, one could argue about finer-grained task packages like > debian-med-research and debian-med-office or some such. This could be > integrated and displayed by tasksel if the respective CDD is installed.
There are differences between CDDs. Debian-Med is highly specialised. Debian Jr. is not. This leads to differences in administration. A Debian-Med box might well be dedicated to the task from the very outset, whereas a Debian Jr. box may be created from a generic installation at a later date. The reason I think integration into the existing package admin tools is important is to accomodate for these different CDD needs. Some people will prefer to just stick in a CDD installation CD and configure a box for a particular purpose. Others will want to customize an existing box for a particular purpose after doing a generic install. We should aim to accomodate both groups of users. > Anyway, I thought that we were beyond the conception of task packages as > regular Debian packages. Tasks themselves are not regular Debian packages, but the modules contained within the task currently are. I had hoped we would eventually work around the inflexibility of using meta packages for the individual parts of a CDD by a multi-level task system (a task that has subtasks, each of which has dependencies on single packages that may-or-may-not be available and won't scuttle the install if they aren't). But since the tasksel maintainer seems to be moving away from that direction, I'm proposing we move on from this issue and see what we can do in the standard package admin tools. As mentioned several times before, debtags are promising. If all parts of a task are tagged, and the package admin tools allow selection of the parts to install based on generic or more specific tags, that does away with the inflexibility of Depends. But thus far, I haven't seen any process documented for "how to use debtags to install a CDD in whole or in part". Perhaps now is the time to do that. Ben -- synrg at debian dot org
