[Synaptic-devel] experimental task support added

[Michael Vogt]

Dear Friends,


as discussed some weeks ago with Panu I added experimental task
support for synaptic. It works pretty well on debian already, but you
need a bleeding edge tasksel (get it via "svn co
svn://svn.debian.org/tasksel/trunk") to make it work. 

Here is a screenshot of it in action:
http://people.debian.org/~mvo/synaptic/synaptic-with-tasks.png

The GUI needs a bit more love, I hope Sebastian can have a look at it
:) The Tasks are currently under "File/Tasks", this is likley to
change.

The design should make it easier for other distros to add there own
task (or whatever it is called there) support. The current code uses
the following "protocol":

Please note, that we can easily change /usr/bin/tasksel to something
different or make it configurable via synaptic.conf or -o
Synaptic::taskHelperProg or something.

Please also note that the --task-descr function (and the properties
button in the current GUI) does not work yet. 

As always, feedback about this feature is welcome!


bye,
 Michael

Task support for synaptic
-------------------------


Synaptic works on quite a few distributions. To make support for the
various task systems easy synaptic needs a helper application called
"/usr/bin/tasksel". It has to support the following commands:

--list-tasks: returns a list of the format
              "$taskname\t$task-short-description"

--task-packages $task: list the packages included in the given task
                       this option can be used more than once for
                       different tasks

--task-descr $task: print a long description about the given task


Examples:

$ tasksel --list-tasks
database-server SQL database
desktop Desktop environment
dns-server      DNS server
file-server     File server
mail-server     Mail server
print-server    Print server
web-server      Web server

$ tasksel --task-packages dns-server --task-packages print-server
bind9
bind9-doc
dlint
dnsutils
lwresd
cupsys
cupsys-bsd
cupsys-client
cupsys-driver-gimpprint
foomatic-db-engine
foomatic-db-hpijs
foomatic-filters-ppds

bye,
 Michael