Hi Cyril, thanks for your response.
On 17.05.2016 02:13, Cyril Brulebois wrote: > I'm not sure how reasonable it is to have such a long list of meta > packages in the installer. See attached tasksel-gtk-greyscale.png for > the initial display with the graphical installer, and attached > tasksel-text-greyscale.png for the text mode installer. I don't see it problematic as it is in the moment: The list is not too long: Even if it does not fit on one screen, the rest is visible with just one scroll, and this is indicated by the scroollbar. And I don't think that the number of options is too much (it shouldn't be much more, however). > Also, not sure about the (lack of) ordering in Debian Pure Blends. > The Debian desktop environment submenu might be considered a bit special > (esp. after the default desktop changes…), but I don't see why the DPB > one should be unsorted. (See attached tasksel-unsorted-greyscale.png) There is no specific order of the blends. One might think of some structuring -- many blends are somehow science related, while others are not --, but there is not much more to say about the internal structure. And I have no idea how to get a better order even in this sense. In the moment, they are alphabetically sorted, and this somehow reflects the order they appear in the blends web page [1]. It also may help to find a specific blend. Another idea would be to sort by popconn, but this is not transparent to the end user. And, other than that, I see nothing that would make list f.e. Debian Astro before or after DebiChem. To improve that, two things have to be done: First, the tasksel mechanism should allow ordered lists (in the moment, they are automatically sorted as long as they have the same priority) -- please open a bug report for this, if needed. Second, we need a good idea *how* they should be actually ordered so that a specific blend can easily be found. Do you have a proposal? One problem here is the limited support of debconf for structures: there is one (hackish) level of sections (eaten up by the "Debian Pure Blends" section), but no folding or similar. Since this is discussed now over years without anyone actually implementing an improvement here, I doubt that that willbe changed before the next release, so we need something that works in the current scheme (well, unless *you* volunteer to implement this ;-) ). And I also think that for an installer, there should not be too much structure, since this makes the installation too complicated. On the other hand, the current implementation is criticized by some blends, f.e. NeuroDebian, who wishes a specific selection up to the package level here. Do you have any proposals what should be changed? Best regards Ole [1] https://www.debian.org/blends/
