Bug#504659: tasksel: Gnome pushes File and DNS server and language tasks off CD1

[Frans Pop]

Package: tasksel
Version: 2.76
Severity: serious
Justification: Unsuitable for release

While testing a Lenny RC2 preview CD in a "CD1 only, no mirror"
installation, I noticed that the File server and DNS server tasks
were missing from the list of available tasks during pkgsel. This
also means that the CD contains no language tasks at all.

It looks like the main reason for this is the recent changes in the
gnome-desktop task, which changed its "key" package to 'gnome' from
'gnome-desktop-environment'. Result of this change is that Gnome
takes up ~60MB more on CD1 than it used to and thus pushes off other
tasks.

This can be easily seen by running 'aptitude -R' on a clean system
(the difference in the last column is what's relevant here):
                          installed size  download size
gnome-desktop-environment          787MB          304MB
gnome                              959MB          368MB

IMO this regression in the contents of CD1 should be fixed for Lenny.

The only way to do this is to change back to 'gnome-desktop-environment'
as "key" package for the gnome-desktop task and make 'gnome' a regular
package in the task.
This will NOT change the installation of Gnome in any way if a mirror
is available or if multiple CDs or a DVD are used. But it will result
in CD1 being more generally usable again for installations where that CD
is the only available source.

Even with that change it still seems to me that Gnome claims too much
space on CD1. The gnome-d-e task depends on a number of packages that,
although important for a good desktop experience, are not so essential
that they need to be on CD1. And I would even say that VNC or webcam
support, a VoIP client, or even a CD burner are "required" for a desktop
system as users may just not have the hardware or be interested in that
functionality.

I would therefore suggest to change the following packages from Depends
to Recommends in gnome-d-e:
- gnome-user-guide (16MB download size!)
- vinagre
- vino
- ekiga
- cheese
- nautilus-cd-burner

Total savings from this suggested list for CD1: 36MB. Possibly some other
packages from gnome-d-e's current dependencies could be added to this list.

Having them as Recommends would mean they will still get installed if
users install gnome-d-e manually and adds flexibility as users will gain
the option to have gnome-d-e installed without those packages if they
don't need them.

To ensure the packages still get installed during a desktop installation
using D-I there are two options:
- adding them as Depends in the 'gnome' meta-package (preferred IMO)
- listing them separately as non-key packages in the gnome-desktop task

The main benefit of this reduction will be better international support on
CD1 as there will be much more space available for "key" packages from
language tasks.

Cheers,
FJP

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.27.4 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages tasksel depends on:
ii  aptitude             0.4.11.10-1lenny1.1 terminal-based package manager
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0 1.5.24              Debian configuration management sy
ii  liblocale-gettext-pe 1.05-4              Using libc functions for internati
ii  tasksel-data         2.76                Official tasks used for installati

tasksel recommends no packages.

tasksel suggests no packages.

-- debconf information excluded