Re: Installation Profiles [was: Re: Reality check!]
On Saturday 30 January 1999, at 16 h 41, the keyboard of Paul Seelig [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Okay, let's be serious again: unfortunately this actually means that some of the most obvious installation profiles of slink stay to be unnecessarily bloated. Giving the size of the current profiles, I agree they are bloated. While they are small enough for a new PC with a 2 Gb drive, they don't fit on most hard disks if they are some years old. It's one of Debian's strengths IMHO to give freedom of choice but we [BTW, during a flame war with a RedHat fan, he said, as a reproach to Debian, that Debian was bad because we have *several* HTTP servers packaged. I wondered why he did not stay with Microsoft, where this dreadful choice was carefully avoided.] oversized default down my throat and i severely doubt that the targeted average user would be capable of deciding whether a given profile is *really* suitable for him or not. So why not better reduce the profiles? I mean less is often enough more! First, a bit of summary. This should probably go in the installation guide, but I just want to be sure that everybody understands that you can choose your packages, at the initial installation, in three ways, from the most difficult to the most we do it for you: 0) vi myPackages, then dpkg --set-selections myPackages :-) 1) The old dselect way. Even for experienced Unix administrators, with more than 2 000 packages, it is difficult. 2) The selection of tasks. Unlike profiles, you can choose several tasks, for instance Web server *and* HTML authoring. I welcome any other tasks, the more they are, the better, until we have as many tasks as packages :-) 3) The selection of profiles. Profiles should not be too many, because Joe User will not want to scan the whole list and should be very complete, because they are intended for users who will not want to install anything again soon. May be they have a work to do or may be they will not want to learn a new game just after the installation. The principle of least surprise say that everything which the user can use should be there. I think it is a very bad habit to first fill up the disk with redundant selections and then expect the installer to deinstalll what [s]he doesn't like/want in order to make room for other software. Remember that the PowerUser can do it the other way around by selecting every package by hand or even using tasks instead of profiles. Maybe we should rather decide whether we primarily target Joe User or not? Even with the most perfect profiles i doubt that Debian would be a good choice at all for the average newbie. I always thought that Debian was rather meant for competent thinking people who can be expected to choose by themselves? I personnally agree, but we never dared to put it in writing, by fear to ease the job of RedHat marketing. I think this is a problem of the right choice. One just can't make it right for everybody and it is no good idea to add things in order to please everybody (i vaguely remember an article by Alan Cox about the town council and whatnot in this context). I've read the paper. I agree, management is the ability to say no. There is also a story in German-speaking countries about the miller, his son and the donkey. (They try to reach the market in town but lose a lot of time because of contradictory advices on the road.) Be my guest. Would this still go into slink or into potato? It can still go to slink, since this is a change which will probably breaks nothing (but we had a lot of problems with non-i386 architectures, which lack some packages so if you really want a new task in slink, hurry up).
Re: Installation Profiles [was: Re: Reality check!]
Might it be possible to include fewer packages in each profile and then present the user with a list of additional packages that might be of interest to them given that they have chosen this particular profile? Something like You have installed the Scientific Workstation profile. The following additional packages may be of interest ... a possibility i considered: divide user-space (i use the term loosely here. things that wouldn't be considered user-space by some, such as the interpreters section, count) packages into heirarchical groups (structure identical or similar to the debian menus, possibly?). have a level wherein the user selects any of these he wants; it will be easy to skip those things he obviously doesn't want (i can safely skip Applications/Ham-Radio and such things). this would save a *lot* of time, especially for anal people like me who actually read all two to three thousand package descriptions (really. initially installing hamm took me all weekend). any dependencies are autoselected, so i don't have to spend hours looking through libweird-2.3, libweird-2.3-dev, libweird2.3-dbg, libweird2.3-doc, libweird4.2, libweird4.2-dev, libweird4.2-dbg, libweird4.2-doc, ad infinitum (or at least ad nauseam). according to policy i should be able to just install all the optional things and then look at extra iff i want something really specialized, but that really doesn't scale too well. --phouchg
Re: Installation Profiles [was: Re: Reality check!]
[ redundant emacs versions ] Well, I'll suggest that for potato. It will start a nice flame-war on debian-devel emacs vs. xemacs. Hey, that's just what we need at this stage for *slink*! :-) Okay, let's be serious again: unfortunately this actually means that some of the most obvious installation profiles of slink stay to be unnecessarily bloated. I consider this to be a bad move because the initial install is something like Debian's advertisement plate (or visiting card) and the installation of three emacs variants gives a rather bad impression IMHO. I mean, who would *really* want to have *three* emacs variants installed at once and above all right at the first installation stage? Especially given I have never been able to get emacs19 and emacs20 to coexist on a debian system: emacs19 works, but it's config script always fails, and so it is flagged as 1/2 configured. I only use it for reading GROGGS, so I guess that doesn't matter too much. Matthew -- Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo [EMAIL PROTECTED], Steward of the Cambridge Tolkien Society Selwyn College Computer Support http://www.cam.ac.uk/CambUniv/Societies/tolkien/ http://pick.sel.cam.ac.uk/
Re: Installation Profiles [was: Re: Reality check!]
Paul Seelig writes: Myself i do prefer XEmacs over all other variants but wouldn't mind if i had to install it later on my own. I prefer emacs, bu I also wouldn't mind if i had to install it later on my own. In fact, I would not mind at all if emacs was optional. IMHO it would be much wiser to provide a useful *minimum* in each category upon which people can base their own choices. That is what I originally thought the profiles were for. As it stands Basic is far too basic for being an acceptable minimum and the other profiles are far beyond being a truly useable minimum. Might it be possible to include fewer packages in each profile and then present the user with a list of additional packages that might be of interest to them given that they have chosen this particular profile? Something like You have installed the Scientific Workstation profile. The following additional packages may be of interest ... -- John HaslerThis posting is in the public domain. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Do with it what you will. Dancing Horse Hill Make money from it if you can; I don't mind. Elmwood, Wisconsin Do not send email advertisements to this address.
