[1450] in athena10
Re: extra-software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Mon Mar 9 18:45:22 2009
Cc: debathena@mit.edu
Message-Id: <5B101DEF-7B9A-43D1-8423-C4BAE3F3B74B@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <49B58E93.2060202@mit.edu>
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Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 18:44:18 -0400
On Mar 9, 2009, at 5:48 PM, Evan Broder wrote:
> Lots of e-mail today!
>
> I'd like to change all of the dependencies in debathena-extra-software
> and debathena-extra-software-nox to recommendations.
>
> This should continue to result in all of the packages being
> installed on
> cluster machines, since aptitude takes recommendations by default, but
> gives users the option of excluding large (or maybe not so large)
> dependencies that they don't want - say, for example, texlive-full.
How does the user exclude packages? Would aptitude inform the user
that they're not getting some recommendations, and why, or would it be
up to the user to run "aptitude why-not"? If the problem is texlive,
then we should fix texlive, or install a smaller subset of texlive
packages.
> The only downside I see to this is support - having -extra-software
> installed no longer provides a solid guarantee that the packages it
> pulls in are installed, although it remains very likely. It seems that
> using athinfo packages can work around this relatively well, but I
> wanted to check in with the list and see what people (primarily Jon)
> thought.
The whole point of having cluster machines is that they're a standard
configuration, that's what makes them inherently supportable. I'd
really like to know that the only reason a cluster machine wouldn't
have -extra-software is because of a network or disk failure, not
because aptitude got confused and thought it was a good idea not to
install something. Ideally, I'd like -workstation machines to have
this too, but I understand the concern about not forcing things on
users.
> I'd kind of like to do this before I add kde-base to -extra-software,
> which I'd like to do soon.
I think we need to clarify what exactly -extra-software is supposed to
be. My understanding was "a bunch of stuff that was historically part
of the release in Athena 9 and should probably be installed locally".
That's clearly no longer the case, if we're installing KDE.
(Discussion on Zephyr has clarified that this is actually just kwm,
kpanel, konsole, konqueror, and some other stuff, but still) I
realize the barrier to entry in getting things into the release is a
lot lower in Debathena, and that's a good thing, but it seems like -
extra-software is heading the way of "If someone asks for it, we'll
add it", which is not sustainable in the long term, nor is it
supportable. OLC is not prepared to support KDE, for example. I
think moving locker software locally is a good thing, but I think
having _all_ locker software locally is no better than having _all_
software in AFS.
I'm not sure the best way to proceed from here, but I think we need to
think harder about this. One solution might be the following:
debathena-extra-software depends on a set of packages that we identify
as critical. It can then recommend everything else. On the off
chance that you get a cluster machine that doesn't have, say, KDE
installed, then you should report it and go find another one. But if
you get a cluster machine that doesn't have, say, emacs, that's a
problem.
I think texlive is its own problem, and we should fix it differently,
possibly by creating a debathena-tex metapackage, and having -cluster
depend on that, and -extra-software only recommend it.
-Jon
