Infrastructure for meta-distribution projects

[Andreas Tille]

On 4 Jun 2003, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:

> * (Not yet implemented) A group that a Debian-Jr user should be added
>   to in order to enable customised menus and maybe other features
Debian-Med implements this group.  You should have a deep look into med-common.
I guess it makes sense to strip something from it into an "internal-common"
(or whatever reasonable name we would choose).  I build these meta-packages
by the help of some tools in med-common-dev.  To make it clear: It is absolutely
not necessary to use med-common-dev - it is more or less a tool to support
my lazyness where I do not have to copy code snippets for different meta packages.
Ben did not adopt this for his packages because he does not even use debhelper
because of speed issues.

> I am wondering whether this is still the best way to approach it.  In
> particular, although the task "Debian-Jr" installs a base Debian-Jr
> system, in order to install additional packages you have to manually go
> through the list of packages and look for packages that begin with the
> prefix "junior-".  This seems clunky and difficult.
Hmmm, I do not really understand your problem.  The task depends from
all junior packages.  I just filed a bug report against tasksel
    http://bugs.debian.org/186085
to include Debian-Med in the same way.  In my opinion this is a reasonable
way to go.

> With the new package tags system (although not integrated into the
> installer yet), we can presumably do away with this.
I hope so. I have to admit that I did not had a deeper look but it seems
reasonable and promissing for our purpose.

> We may well still
> have a task that would install a base Debian-Lex system, but for
> additional or alternative packages we would run a tags browser which (by
> default) would filter for packages with the "legal" tag, and offer the
> users sub-tags that they could use for further filering or grouping
> (these would replace the metapackages that Debian-Jr uses now).  Or, we
> could go further than that, and do away with a task altogether, and
> *just* use package tags.
>
> What do people think is the best way to go?
IMHO as long as there are not tools to handle the tags system in stable
we have to stick to Meta-Packages.

> Also, does anyone feel that there should be a separate installer that
> installs Debian-Lex by default instead of just Debian?  That way, we can
> hand it to a user and say "Here is a Debian-Lex CD" rather than "Here is
> a Debian CD, and here is some documentation about how to use it to
> install Debian-Lex".
I'm not sure about that.  My prefered way is to build a Knoppix derivate
which contains all Debian-Med stuff.  For this purpose I try to implement
a new system which makes it brain dead easy to build Knoppix CDs from
the Debian-Mirror.  The problem is that this system is currently plain
fiction ...

> Ideally, this ought to just involve a simple
> change to Debian Installer or boot-floppies, without the need to change
> anything else in the main distribution (a la Knoppix).  Logically, all
> the meta-distributions ought to collaborate on this.
For sure we should collaborate here.  That's why I would love to move this
thread to a public mailing list (prefered debian-internal - but this list
is not yet created :-(( - and I can't even find the bug report with the
request - I'm sure I filed it long time ago).  So feel free to quote me
on debian-devel.

Kind regards

        Andreas.