Kind of reviving an old thread, but anyway: On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 07:12:35PM +0100, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote: > I believe it to be one of the more important bits of a standard Unix > *desktop* installation - but this just reminds me of the fact that I'm > quite uncomfortable with keeping a system like package priorities around > for much longer. Diverging use-cases (like in this case) show that one > definition of "standard" isn't really helpful anymore.
Haven't we more or less already moved away from priorities as meaning anything particularly important? We have: required/essential -- stuff that can't be removed: libc, dpkg, etc important -- the rest of base, stuff necessary to bootstrap and recover a usable and useful system standard -- a minimal collection of useful stuff we'd like to see on every Debian system optional -- all the good software in the world extra -- obscure stuff All the really important questions are which bits of "optional" (and occassionally extra) are useful for a given user. I'm not sure if there's any point to continuing to try to make sure that nothing >= optional conflicts with anything else >= optional. > I think we may want to start thinking about getting rid of the whole > thing and switching to something which allows us to express more complex > importance measurements for packages. In fact, d-i and its task system > have been a step in that direction, so we maybe should evaluate if we > want to formalize it a bit more and get it into policy to replace > priorities. required and important are both needed by debootstrap, so can't be gotten rid of (though they could be changed to use some other field/name). Priority: standard currently contains: at, bc, dc, lsof, file, less, sharutils, strace dnsutils, ftp, host, ssh, mtr-tiny, finger, w3m, whois doc-debian, doc-linux-text exim, mailx, mutt, procmail, mime-support, mpack gettext-base, locales pciutils perl (not just perl-base), python reportbug selinux policy That seems a pretty reasonable set of functionality to put on all Debian boxes (unless the admin specifically says otherwise), afaics. It might be sensible to replace ftp with lftp these days, though. And I'm not sure what happened to the exim v postfix defaults discussion a little while ago, and maybe procmail/mpack aren't all that necessary. It also includes, but afaics, probably doesn't need to (anymore): ispell, dictionaries-common, iamerican, ibritish, wamerican m4, texinfo (???) mtools (access unmounted msdos filesystems, not NTFS though) nfs-common, portmap (enables mounting NFS shares) pidentd (is IDENT still used on today's internet, with all its NAT?) openbsd-inetd (needed by pidentd) tcsh (people who remember what it is know how to install it) time (???) telnet (netcat is important, as is wget) But as far as "default installs" for anything of any real meaning, I just don't see Priorities as being relevant anymore. Cheers, aj
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature