[1465] in athena10
Re: extra-software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Geoffrey Thomas)
Tue Mar 10 05:25:16 2009
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:24:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
cc: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>, debathena@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <5B101DEF-7B9A-43D1-8423-C4BAE3F3B74B@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.2.00.0903100507200.17348@yaz-pistachio.mit.edu>
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On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> On Mar 9, 2009, at 5:48 PM, Evan Broder wrote:
>> 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.
If I wanted to install extra-software without, say, OpenOffice, I can run
aptitude install debathena-extra-software openoffice.org:
(the colon meaning "hold"). Alternately, at the aptitude [Y/n/?] prompt, I
can say ":openoffice.org" or "-openoffice.org". For a package that brings
in other packages, the dependency resolver is always triggered, and I can
ask it to try to resolve them differently by adding and removing packages;
this is a somewhat degenerate case of that mechanism.
aptitude why-not will tell you if an explicit conflict is preventing
something from being installed, but not if you manually opted out in the
past.
> 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.
Assuming there are no horrible bugs in the dependency resolver, changing
them to recommendations will have the opposite effect -- if one package
isn't installable, the rest of -extra-software will still be okay to
install. Currently, as hard dependencies, uninstalling e.g. wmweather will
also punt everything else in extra-software.
> Ideally, I'd like -workstation machines to have this too, but I understand
> the concern about not forcing things on users.
One thing we could do is split -extra-software into two packages, one for
-standard users that's just recommendations, and one for -workstation
and above that's hard dependencies.
> 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.
One concern we've discussed in the past before the chroot system
crystallized is that it might be a support problem for most but not all
machines to end up with something (e.g., vim-full instead of vim-tiny) and
confuse people on the few machines that the people with aptitude clue
never got to. Is this not actually an issue?
As the other side of that coin, I'm not sure it's currently possible for
KDE to be installed on some but not all cluster machines without those
machines having had things done to them that we disapprove of.
> 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.
Probably reasonable, and in general I'd support -extra-software being just
recommendations but having the more interesting packages also be hard
dependencies of -cluster. Note that TeX is just "texlive-full |
tetex-extra", so there's no need for a metapackage.
--
Geoffrey Thomas
geofft@mit.edu
