On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 09:40:06PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote: > Unfortunately, these conditionals make things _extremely_ > non-deterministic as to how they're going to work. In the past, without > the per-group details, it was just kind of annoying. Now, it would be > absolutely mind boggling. Just think about how having one group > selected drastically changes what gets selected otherwise -- how do you > handle that if someone edits Development, then selects KDE? Do you turn > on KDE Development or not? Hmmm. I guess I was still thinking in the old terms, where individual package selection happened as a step after group selection. There, this presents no real problem, as long as you avoid making loops. With the group-details approach, yeah, I can see how it's more difficult. Personally, I'm inclinded to think the niceties offered by conditionals outweigh the benefits of individual package selection in the installer. As several people suggested in the discussion on fedora-devel, post-install tools like apt-get, yum, and up2date are better suited for that task anyway. The installer itself should just do the basic job, and the groups should be well thought out and well selected. This fits well with the modern philosophy of Fedora's core desktop, GNOME -- see particularly Havoc's "no crackrock" policy for metacity. Alternately, going the geeky route instead of the GNOME-zen clean-preferencesless way, the details screens could present packages which are listed in a conditional block as greyed out, and when you check one, it would ask you if you'd like to enable the required group. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
