ReviveTasksel

Revision 1 as of 2006-06-08 20:02:21

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Summary

Re-investigate tasksel for use in our text-mode installer to provide finer-grained package selection.

Rationale

Users often request more fine-grained package selection in the installer. Now that tasksel is much improved from when we decided not to use it for Warty, and now that Ubiquity is available as the simplest installation method, it may be time to consider reviving tasksel as an expert mode feature in the text-mode installer. To do this, we need to sketch out reasonable subdivisions of our existing seeds as sets of packages that a user might want to install to perform a particular common task, perhaps with reference to the existing Debian tasks; work out how to express these in a reasonable way in our seeds, and transfer this data automatically to tasksel; and resurrect the relevant code in pkgsel.

Use cases

  • For the server CD, there are many different sets of packages that one might want to install, but none of them make sense to install by default (since there's no "one size fits all" for servers). At present, we only handle one of these cases (LAMP), and we do so by adding a boot option. It would be nice to be able to deal with this without having to add a boot option for every possibility, since that doesn't scale well and doesn't allow selecting more than one task at once.

Scope

Design

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec