Please be verbose whether you would like to get your Blend promoted by tasksel

[Felipe Sateler]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> Quoting Felipe Sateler (2014-08-27 17:19:27)
>> On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 7:27 AM, Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu> wrote:
>>> yesterday I joined the videostream of the installer BoF at
>>> DebConf[1]. I also became a bit involved via IRC.  Joey Hess raised
>>> the question about the criteria to add a Blend or not.  I answered
>>> "all in the list of the bug report #758116" which IMHO fits the
>>> criterion of "actively maintained and some valuable content for
>>> users".
>>>
>>> I think it should be also a criterion that the team behind the Blend
>>> confirms that they are interested and so I'm hereby pinging all lists
>>> in question to ask you for confirmation.
>>
>> Do we want to pursue this? I think that if we could manage to provide
>> useful blend packages it would be worth it, but so far I have failed
>> to do so. I think maybe we need to rethink the approach and reduce the
>> number of metapackages. Today we have too many. Maybe we should reduce
>> them to 2: multimedia-codecs and multimedia-production.
>
> When this blend emerged I was surprised it only grouped by functionality
> - I imagine few users need "8 ways to loop audio" or "7 drum machines",
> and more need either "a rich drum-machine and rudimentary other tools
> missing from that specific tool relevant for drum-oriented production"
> or "a rich loop engine and rudimentary add-on tools missing from that
> specific tool relevant for loop-oriented multimedia production".
>
> Each such "scenario"-oriented would have the potential to grow from
> simple metapackage to also include choice of window manager and custom
> tuning of that to optimize for the scenario, and suitable Gtk+ and Qt
> skin, and some graphics that goes well with it.  I.e. "spice" not
> technically multimedia but part of a multimedia user experience.
>
> The games team has created metapackages grouped by gaming style, but
> also done a few subjective selections.  That I find inspiring.
>
> Perhaps leave all the current multimedia metapackages as-is, but add
> additional subjective ones each composing an _environment_ for
> consuming/producing multimedia.

Yes, I think that would be very useful. However, it has become
apparent that we cannot even maintain a list of all the multimedia
packages, so I would not expect us to be able to maintain such an
"opinionated" metapackage.

It was raised on IRC by Paul Wise that we could invite the people from
kxstudio and avlinux (the biggest multimedia-oriented downstreams) to
help with packaging, and I think they could also help a lot in
crafting multimedia blends.

> Also consuming multimedia is IMO relevant to group like that: When using
> KDE (and therefore libphonon) what is recommended players and codec
> packages and whatever to use together?  How about a lightweight (i.e.
> non-GNOME and non-KDE) desktop - what do we recommend to use there?
>
> For the DebianParl blend (which uses Xfce desktop) I have experimented
> with avoiding GStreamer framework altogether.  That is possible - and is
> quite lightweight.
>
>
> Specifically your idea to create a multimedia-codecs: I think few user
> really wants "all codecs in the FLOSS World" - that's merely the
> desparate consequence of "all relevant FLOSS codecs installed and
> properly registered" too often missing.  Let's fix the real problem, not
> encourage our users to bogusly reframe it.

While in principle we could produce such packages (if we found the
manpower to do so), I think that the complexity added by having
multiple versions is counterproductive. Instructions found on the
internet usually focus on the easy, not on the correct or space
efficient. So I think in this case the perfect is indeed enemy of the
good.


-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler