any shortcut to install all dev-related packages?

[Robert P. J. Day]

Quoting Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com>:

> On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Robert P. J. Day   
> <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>>   i just found the task definition file
>> /usr/share/tasksel/ubuntu-tasks.desc, but i'm disappointed that
>> there's no "task" to turn my stock 10.04 laptop into a development
>> workstation -- that is, installing the various compilers,
>> interpreters, linkers, autotools packages, version control tools and
>> so on.
>>
>> is there a meta-install incantation for that?  or do i have to pick
>> and choose?  thanks.
>
> The closest that I know to RHEL's
> yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"
> is
> aptitude install build-essential
> to which you might need to add some libraries.
>
> By the way, you can lists the tasksel tasks with
> tasksel --list-tasks

   and now, i have more dumb questions.  first, what's the difference  
between a task and a meta-package?  i can see from the output of the  
above command that "ubuntu-desktop" is allegedly a task.  but if i  
read here:

   https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MetaPackages

i'm informed that "ubuntu-desktop" is actually a metapackage.  so what  
is "build-essential"?  if i want to know the packages in a task, i can:

   $ tasksel --task-packages ubuntu-desktop

what would tell me the packages that correspond to "build-essential?"   
and not just the ones remaining to be installed, but all of them?

rday