On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 11:10:47PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > I think it makes as much sense as the existing task packages. > > Existing brokenness is no excuse for new brokenness though. I have gone > into detail about how the current task system is fubar, and I think I've > filed bugs on most of the task packages you mention since they should > not exist.
A few sentences in policy, or a small web page on /devel might help keep this from happening. More effective though, I think, would be to give developers a good way to express what they are trying to express with these broken task packages. I think they want to give users a way to easily select common packages at installation time. When I first installed Debian, I spent hours in dselect figuring out what I wanted, and today there are several times as many packages. I think most packages that fall into this category are server programs. Desktop systems tend to be installed once and last a long time. I seem to build servers many times more frequently than desktop systems, either to bring more capacity online or to experiment with different applications. Maybe what is needed is a "Server installation" menu which allows the user to install packages like these without searching around for them. Or, maybe we just need a better dselect. -- - mdz
