I'm very suprised to see syslinux menus being used to offer a choice amoung desktop environments. This subverts d-i's design principles on several levels:
1. It's a fundamental principle of d-i's UI design that we ask questions
using debconf. And the clumsiness of this syslinux menu UI for
selecting desktops is a good example of why that was a good design
choice[*]. (BTW, we're overusing kernel boot options too these days.)
2. A goal of d-i from the very beginning has been modularity and
generallty; this requires a lot of non-modular, and barely maintainable
syslinux menu gunk, that only works on i386 and amd64.
3. A goal of d-i from the very beginning has been to try to entice
package maintainers to be involved in d-i and responsible for d-i's
use of their package, in the knowledge that the d-i team can't do
everything themselves. This is why we have udebs, and a passthrough
debconf frontend allowing packages interact with the user within d-i.
But here d-i is overriding choices made in a package.
FYI, it's disingenuous to say "Joey made this desision (re tasksel) and
we did this to work around him." Firstly, that alienates me from this
project. Secondly, I am not some rock that makes pronoucements by fiat
that the project is then responsible for working around; and I don't
appreciate being portrayed that way. Finally, the argument regarding the
problem of forcing user choice of desktop environments stands on its own
and has been made by others than me, with similar conclusions, both in
Debian and outside. BTW, I am stunned that SuSE is being dragged in as
an example of good UI choice.
--
see shy jo
[*] I suspect I understand syslinux slightly better than the
average user, yet I was confused and startled by the behavior of the
desktop menu -- choosing a desktop appeared at first to dump me back
into the top menu with no action.
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