The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: quick install method (was Re: Deity project schedule problems)



Craig Sanders wrote:

> after base installation and reboot, drop the user into a menu offering
> one of a number of pre-tested dselect selection sets (plus an "expert"
> option to run dselect).

I think this is excellent.

> anyway, that's a digression. back to the point...here's some suggested
> sets:
[snipped]

>     "Text-only Games"
>         including net games stuff like tf mud client and ircii
> 
>     "X Games"
>         again, including networked games stuff

I think this is too much detail.  (See below)

> these selection sets should be compatible and cumulative.  i.e. you can pick
> "internet client" + "internet server" + "X windows workstation".

I think this makes it harder, without corresponding benefit.  (Remember
that all combinations would have to be tested).  I think a simple "minimal",
"average", or "complete" choice would be better.  And we already have
something like that in the package organisation.  Some (edited) quotes
from the policy manual:

     `important'
          Important programs, including those which one would expect to
          find on any Unix-like system. The `important' packages are just
          a bare minimum of commonly-expected and necessary tools. 

     `standard'
          These packages provide a reasonably small but not too limited
          character-mode system. This is what will install by default if
          the user doesn't select anything else.

     `optional'
          This is all the software that you
          might reasonably want to install if you didn't know what it was
          or don't have specialised requirements.

Currently `standard' is the group that can be selected automatically,
and I think it's what I would call "minimal".  If you add in everything
from `optional' you get what I would call "complete".  I think that what's
missing is a set in between that might be described as "a reasonably
small but not too limited X-based system".

(It might, in fact, be good to add such a priority class in the future.)

> i don't think that it needs to be any more than a "quick hack" because it's
> only a stop-gap solution until deity gets here.

Agreed.  That's why I suggest an even simpler approach :-)

> Rule of Thumb: only packages in main can be in the selection sets. no
> contrib, no non-free, no non-us.

Definitely. 

> 2nd Rule of Thumb: selection sets to be minimalist. only the bare
> minimum needed to fulfil the promise of the description to be included.
> "bare minimum" is defined by the person who actually puts in the work to
> create and test a selection set.

I don't think this is a good idea.  The smallest set should be minimal
(because that's its main point), but hard disk space tends to be cheaper
than the installer's time.

The default sets should be listed together with their approximate 
installed size in megabytes, so that the installer will have some
idea whether tuning them by hand is necessary.

(Perhaps "tuning" is a better name than "expert option".  We don't
want to scare people away from dselect, we just want to offer an
alternative.)

This approach will be a superset of the current installation
procedure, which is then equivalent to "minimal" plus tuning.

P.S. Why are we discussing this on debian-private?

Richard Braakman


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-private-request@lists.debian.org . 
Trouble?  e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .