On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 07:21:54PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote: > On and off, I've been hacking on tasksel for quite a while to improve > the UI there and add better support for things like Blends. I've made > some progress in my hacking, but I think I've hit a brick wall and I > need to change tack. :-/ > > What I've ended up doing so far is hacking tasksel to give a poor > *approximation* of a tree-style layout: classifying some existing > tasks under headers and building a tree, then displaying each of the > nodes of the tree one level at a time via the existing debconf > setup. It just about works, but it's ugly as all hell and I'm not > happy with where I've got to. I've sunk a lot of development time into > this, but I don't think it's ready to fly this way. :-( > > What I *actually* need here is proper support in debconf for > tree-style selection. I'm thinking of adding that, adding new types > "treeselect" as a tree-equivalent of "select" and "multitreeselect" as > an extension of "multitselect". The first one may not even be needed, > but would be a trivial simplification of the second, so *meh*.
grub2's maintainer scripts attempt to emulate something a bit like a tree-style multiselect by putting "- " at the start of the partition descriptions to indicate that they're under the disks. It's certainly not ideal; I'd be open to considering something better, although it might take some time to be usable by packages in general. (tasksel has an easier time of it than some, since it's a full debconf-based application rather than needing to work at the preconfiguration stage.) > AFAICS I'd need to add at least basic support for the new type(s) into > all the frontends that *can* support it. So, I have a couple of > questions: > > 1. How flexible is Debconf at coping with a frontend not including > support for a type?? Not hugely. The INPUT command would return an internal error with the text "unable to make an input element". I think we'll need at least minimal support across all the frontends, which may need to inform the design of the element. How were you imagining Choices working here? > 2. Is anybody actually ever using the more obscure (to me!) frontends > (e.g. kde, editor)? Is it worth spending time there? Although these require manual selection, I think they do have at least some use, and I'd rather keep them going. It shouldn't be too hard to get full coverage, pulling in help from specialists if necessary. -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
