Maintaining tasks files

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 19:04:41 (CEST), Andreas Tille wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 06:29:11PM +0200, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
>> > several user groups.  If there are applications which are useful for
>> > more groups just list the application in question for all of them.
>> 
>> Interesting. Is there some easy way to query in what tasks a given
>> package is used?
>
> I'm just using grep on the tasks files in SVN.  IMHO for developers this
> is OK.  Do you have any other purpose in mind?

Right, for the developers with a recent svn checkout, that might be
enough.  I was thinking about users that don't have such a checkout
available, but I don't have an important use case in mind right now.

>> > is fullfilled if only one of them is installed as well as if you can
>> > also use
>> >
>> >    Suggests: <not so important package>
>> >
>> > which IMHO are two important advantages over the tasksel approach.
>> 
>> At what time are these metapackages used/installed? After tasksel in the
>> installer?  Instead of tasksel?
>
> I tried to enable selection of Blends tasks immediately after
> installation (see bug #186085) but failed.  So for the moment
> you just install the metapackages as any other package with
> your favourite package management tool.

Mmh, it seems that everyone agrees that Blends (it was called CCDs at
that time) should provide their specialized installation media, and I'd
agree.

But if we have such an installation media, the whole concept of
metapackages feels strange to me. At installation time, we have much
more control about what is installed anyways.

>> BTW, do Blends provide their own, customized installation media? What
>> about live CDs?
>
> We should probably make a FAQ about this.  The answer is: There *should*
> be a script to simplify this but probably it does not exist yet.
> Somebody has prepared something for Debian Med at
>
>   svn://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-med/trunk/community/infrastructure/livecd
>
> In principle metapackages make the lice CD preparation quite simple by
> using live-helper but I would be really happy if somebody would write
> a generalised script + configured hooks which just needs a
>
>    blend-build-livecd <blendname>
>
> and similar with to build d-i images.  It's just a matter of finding the
> nneded time to do this, but in principle it should not be that hard.

Hm, if there is neither of them, what makes a blend a product? There
must be more than a couple of metapackages...

Looking at the existing blends, it seems that Blends currently really
mainly consist of a handful metapackages maintained by a respective
developer community doing marketing and package maintenance. Seems that
I expected something like a product instead.

But anyway, it seems that Debian Live has made a lot of progress for
squeeze. And if the live installer prooves to be working, maybe (some)
blends can go with Live CDs only.

Another thing that might be quite important would be some proper
documentation for the blend in general. That should probably include
installation, maintenance and user guides to the most important featured
applications.

>> About what content are you thinking of at this point?
>
> Multimedia related packages which are in Ubuntu or debian-multimedia.org
> but not (yet) in Debian.  I guess there are some of them, but I'm not
> that deeply involved in this field.

Oh, I don't think we have the ressources to actively look for new
cra^Wstuff to package, but rather already have more enough packages to
look after. But in general, sure, if someone notices a great new
candidate, we'll of course adopt it under the team umbrella.


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