Brandon Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [ woah, this is an old thread, but a good one to bring back. ]
Heh... yeah, I keep around email that I want to reply to, even though it sometimes takes a month or so before I get a chance. > Yes, the next frontend to apt (gnome-apt?) should handle the tasks > specially. They should be able to hit a customize button for each task > which can take you to a dependency resolution screen. This way if the > task depends on a web server or apache, it defaults to apache, and the > customize screen for that task will show all web servers. Then provide > another customize button to handle all packages (what we have now). Hum. I tend to think that the existing control description system is rich enough to already allow this. For example, you can either virtual packages: Depends: httpd or alternatives: Depends: apache | httpd > > Another nice benefit to my scheme is that each task/profile can be > > maintained independantly by different Debian developers. In fact, I > > volunteer to take over the SGML environment task if we do move to this > > scheme. > > Agreed, distributing the work into small chuncks is better and one reason > debian has done so well. Yes -- we'd be pulling the stuff outta the boot-floppies and into the Debian archive in gneeral. You mention you would like a new section. That would be nice, but that's a whole ball of wax I'd rather not get into. I'd rather just put the stuff in the base section, and use a packaging naming convention for now (task-foo, profile-foo). > > So -- lets have a little discussion period, and then decide, and > > perhaps start looking for volunteers. We need to jump on this quick > > so we can have it in place for freeze time, whenever that is. > > It probably isn't difficult to convert the old tasks into packages and put > them up on an apt-able site. Well, if we can come up with a nice boilerplate package, then we're pretty good. A tricky issue is the way that the dependancies can sometimes vary by platform. Stephane B. used slice to solve this previously. I guess this system would have to be replace using debian/substvars and some logic in debian/rules. Theoretically, you could even take all the profiles and tasks, and write a one-shot script to make a buncha packages. However, I'm not sure that would be worthwhile... Can we get a volunteer to work on this stuff, for proof of concept? All the volunteer would need is the file which described the tasks/profiles from the boot-floppies source package. -- .....Adam Di [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>