108 lines
4.7 KiB
Plaintext
108 lines
4.7 KiB
Plaintext
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NOTE: In these lists, package names should be on one line by itself.
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No spaces/tabs/comments on the same line.
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cpp does not remove spaces/tabs, and perl apparently considers literally
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everything between \n and \n as package name. So, it's best to have no
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spaces/tabs at all outside the comment delimiters.
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The exclude/unexclude lists are NOT preprocessed, so comments there are
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not supported.
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-----
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THE "USEFUL CD 1 PROJECT" RATIONALE J.A. Bezemer, Jan-Apr 2001
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costar@panic.et.tudelft.nl
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Quite many Debian users do not have the Complete Official CD set, but only
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one (or sometimes two) CDs. They expect that CD to be as useful as
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possibe, that is, to contain as much useful packages as possible.
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We have four means to determine the usefulness of a (set of) package(s):
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the Popularity Contest (see above), the task-* packages, packages included
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on the official CDs of other distributions, and our own experience.
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We can distinguish two main groups of people that will use a single Debian CD:
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1. People paying nothing
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2. People wanting to pay as little as possible
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ad 1. This happens mostly at tradeshows/expos/conferences. We can further
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subdivide this group into two opposites:
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a. Complete Linux newbies that want to use Debian as their first
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distribution.
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b. Well-experienced Linux users that want to compare Debian to other
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distributions, mostly with the pre-determined intent to either switch
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to the "best" distribution for their own personal use, or employ the
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"best" distribution for some specific project in their company.
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ad 2. This occurs mostly by people ordering CDs from regular vendors.
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While groups a. and b. are also present here, there is another group that
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deserves attention:
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c. Relatively experienced Debian users with a reasonably fast and cheap
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Internet connection that order CD1 to get the bulk of the upgrades, and
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fetch the rest from online repositories.
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The mentioned groups each have specific expectations from their single CD.
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ad a. Newbies often start using a Linux system guided by some manual or
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other piece of literature that may, or may not, be Debian-specific. Many
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introductory Linux books describe/demonstrate the same utilities and
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programs; however several of these examples don't have much to do with the
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daily routine of a more experienced user.
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What they do use:
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- install tools
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- "easy" packages, like task-newbie-help, task-dialup(-isdn), X, Gnome
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What they don't use:
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- "difficult to learn" packages, like task-sgml, task-fortran
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- development packages (well, they may want to compile a new kernel)
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ad b. When comparing Linux distributions, quite often either a simple
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install without much packages is tried, to see "what it looks like", or a
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more elaborate install that mimics one's currently working system, to find
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out "what it feels like." Once Debian is recognized as the truly best
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distribution, a complete CD set will be bought which will be used to
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set-up the production system(s).
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What they do use:
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- install tools
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- "easy" packages
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- to compare distributions: packages found in their current distribution /
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other distributions from which they have collected CDs
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What they don't use:
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- packages that require much setup/tuning, or just "a long time to get
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functional", like task-database-*, task-news-server,
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task-parallel-computing-node
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- "heavy development" packages, like task-sgml-dev, task-objc-dev
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(maybe they are interested in these packages, but they will recognize
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them as being "advanced", and not expect them on the "most popular" CD)
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ad c. Upgrading as much packages as possible from a single CD means that
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the most-used packages on Debian systems should be present on that CD.
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What they do use:
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- packages used on at least 5% of all Debian systems (which happens to be
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the top 5% of the Popularity Contest results)
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What they don't use:
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- the rest
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Keeping all this in mind, a solution was developed that (implicitly) uses
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all mentioned "rating methods" to create a CD 1 that should answer the
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stated demands as well as possible. The lists were entered, tested, verified,
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cross-checked and adjusted, until an acceptable result was reached.
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Further work/Recommendations:
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The described procedure has resulted in a drastically reduced number of
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task-* packages that are forced to go on the first CD. But since the
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Popularity Contest can't handle task-* packages very well, most of them
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will be moved to the last CD in the set, while in many cases all of their
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"contents" are available on "more popular" CDs. It would make more sense
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if a task package is included as soon as, say, 50-70% of it's dependencies
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are included. Since all APT tools are available during CD image creation,
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this can probably be automated entirely.
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