meta packages for ubuntu-desktop

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 03:46:20PM +1100, Lex Hider wrote:

> The 2 big meta packages (ubuntu-desktop and ubuntu-base) are very handy
> for easy installing and upgrading ubuntu.
> 
> However it's not completely easy to choose only parts of the
> ubuntu-desktop packages.
> 
> e.g. I want to just install gnome from ubuntu-desktop.
> 
> if you check out the seed at:
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~cjwatson/seeds/hoary/desktop
> 
> It's divided into headings like: printing, fonts, desktop gnome fonts,
> gstreamer, python.
> 
> I'd like to suggest that instead of ubuntu-desktop depending on ~100
> packs, it depends on a couple of meta packages to ease both
> maintainership and installing. We don't have to go overboard with this,
> but a couple of these I think would be a good idea.

The original idea of these packages was to represent the seeds, and thereby
ease upgrading when the seeds change.  I'm a bit wary of creating a tree of
metapackages as a means of high-level package selection; this was found to
be suboptimal in Debian in the past.

Maybe we should take a step back, describe the use case, and consider
alternative technical solutions to satisfy it.  Can you elaborate?

-- 
 - mdz