Re: -src package standard: proposal #5 and #5a

["Gareth Pearce" <tilps at hotmail dot com>]

> On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 01:07:07PM +1100, Gareth Pearce wrote:
> >> I was thinking that we just needed a category "all" that could be
> >> selected.  I don't think that adding YA window is the way to go.
> >>
> >> You don't think that being able to select/deselect all of a package
would
> >> solve this?
> >
> >I think the addition of a metapackages category RSN - would be the first
> >priority ... any additional things on top of that could wait for more
then a
> >few moments.
>
> We're debating whether this is the correct thing to do or not.  I'm not
> convinced.  Providing the opinion that you think this is a first
> priority doesn't advance the discussion very much.

ahh I thought the debate was on how to present such a category to the user.
Personally in the absense of a program like debian's tasksel, having a
metapackage category seems to me to be the right way to go.
The first metapackage could be 'almost all' or whatever ... which would
cover most of the current concerns.

I like this idea based on a couple of points its
1. using the current system
2. highly configurable

disadvantages I see are
1. it wont automatically expand as new packages are added... it will need to
have a maintainer.

slecting 'all' doesnt have this disadavantage.
but if you have ever tried doing that in dselect under debian, you
understand you end up with a huge list of conflicts it asks you to resolve.
At the moment Cygwin doesnt have that problem, but do we want to limit it in
that way?
This way also doesnt provide any nice middle of the range instalations,
which I think was a point someone made as what was missed when the change
was made.  That its gone from full, to almost nothing.  Alot of people are
going to want middle sized instalations.  Providing metapackages is one way
to solve that, if theres a better way ... then by all means go for that.

On the otherhand - you could have both.  I am not sure I like this option
alot... only really because I dont like the 'selecting all' option all that
much in the way that problems can come with it in the future.  However if
such a path was chosen, metapackages should go in first, since they at least
patially deal with the problem, and can be done without any coding at all.
Creating the setup.hint files should be relatively minor task to start with.
>
> >Although I dont know if 'metapackages' is the most intuitive name
'Standard
> >Installs' - if it was possible to have a 2 word category ...
> >not sure what would be a good name really...
>
> You can have two word categories.

ahh ... okay then ... something like Standard Instalations would sound good
to me... if such a path was taken...


Gareth