RFC: bringing back task packages

[Josselin Mouette]

Le jeudi 17 février 2011 à 19:20 -0400, Joey Hess a écrit : 
> ### gnome
> 
> Would the gnome team want to maintain a task-gnome?
> Much of tasksel's gnome task is already taken from the gnome-core
> and gnome metapackages, with a few more things added. 

Yes, they fit globally the same purpose. There are just some small hacks
to handle tasksel; for example we allow OOo as an alternative to
gnome-office to avoid installing both by default when OOo was already
selected by the desktop task. I don’t think anything needs to change on
that matter.

> task-gnome
> would not need to deal with core X desktop stuff; task-desktop would
> still handle that. Although we could move away from having a task-desktop
> if you'd prefer.

I’d prefer to keep it separate. The gnome metapackage should be
installable on a session server without any X server installed.

> There are also many localized desktop tasks. Mostly these add things
> like localization packages for openoffice, and occasionally some fonts.
> I'd like to see those be maintained in conjunction with task-gnome,
> but it would mean some coordination with the dozens of people who
> currently maintain those localization tasks.

I’m afraid the approach of using tasks for localization does not scale.

Instead, I’d like to see introduced something like conditional
recommends: that is, recommends that would only be installed if a
third-party package if already here (and that would get installed when
installing the said third-party package).

This way, you could do in all packages something like:
        Package: aspell 
        Conditional-Recommends: aspell-en {task-english}, aspell-fr {task-french}, …

This would also be useful for some plugins. I don’t know how hard this
would be to implement in APT.

> Packages -> Recommends
> 	Recommends may be better than what we have now in tasksel.
> 	If aptitude auto-selects *new* recommends of a previously installed
> 	package to be installed? Currently new Packages added to a task
> 	only affect new installations of that task.

AFAIK new Recommends are not installed. That is the reason why we still
heavily use Depends in metapackages instead.

Cheers,
-- 
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