On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 16:35 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: > 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. There were definitely problems still. It made my head hurt on more than one occasion. > 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. I disagree. Single package installation within nicely created groups isn't unreasonable. It's not reasonable for someone to go through a list of 1500 packages to find the one they want. If they're using something like apt-get, yum or up2date, that's what they get. (Okay, that's not entirely true -- yum can use the comps groups, but if we add the conditional stuff, then yum has the same problem there). > 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. I'd say the defaults are, but at the same time, metacity does have _some_ options. And realistically there are things that just don't make sense for the default case but you don't want to bury for people who care about them > 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. Ew, just ew. :) Jeremy
