Maintaining tasks files

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 17:46:18 (CEST), Felipe Sateler wrote:

> On 13/08/10 10:57, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 09:49:01 (CEST), Andreas Tille wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> after subscribing this list I now get several e-mails about packages I
>>> just don't know which are obviosely relevent for multimedia issues but I
>>> just do not feel competent to put into the right task.  Apt-cache told
>>> me that projectm has for instance a binary package libprojectm-dev which
>>> could be added to a (not yet existing) task multimedia-dev which might
>>> collect all those packages which are relevant to package multimedia
>>> applications (for sure there could be also more fine grained tasks for
>>> development issues created).
>>>
>>> In general I would strongly suggest: Please check out the tasks pages
>>> whether they are featuring your package and if not at least drop me a
>>> note to what tasks it should be added.
>> 
>> Well, I think defining these tasks is not easy at all. AFAIUI, the user
>> is expected to select a task and then *all* packages included in the
>> task is going to be installed. However, in our multimedia land, we have
>> both 'consumer' multimedia libraries like codecs, drivers, media
>> players, and software for multimedia producers. For both areas, we have
>> several similar software package that users most likely want to select
>> alternatively, very seldomly together. The 'best' selection of packages
>> depend of course on the exact requirements of the user, but most likely,
>> it will not be the full set of available packages.
>> 
>> Andreas, can you perhaps elaborate on your(?) / the idea about these
>> tasks files and where are they maintained in Debian? The tasksel package
>> or somewhere more decentrally?
>
> As the person who encouraged Andreas to take the Blends thing here, I
> must say that I was definitely not thinking about tasksel-style tasks,
> but rather at the pages he showed during your Debconf talk. Those tasks
> can list all relevant software, and then the user can choose which ones
> to install, because there is no direct interface between tasks and apt.
> In other words, I'm more interested in the display/marketing potential
> of the web site than on the usefulness of tasksel-style tasks.
>
> Also, they are maintained in the blends svn repository
> http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/blends/projects/multimedia/trunk/debian-multimedia/tasks

Oh, interesting. these files look very interesting. I definitly need to
look more closely how they are supposed to be used and what we can use
it for.

BTW, do we have UbuntuStudio folks here? Would a channeling of your work
in a Debian Multimedia Blend be beneficial to you?

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4