Idea: "{Gnome,KDE,Xfce,...} Minimal Desktop" groups

[Sandro Mani]

On 29.04.2013 19:21, Michael Scherer wrote:
> Le lundi 29 avril 2013 à 16:58 +0200, Sandro Mani a écrit :
>
>> On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Rich Mattes <richmattes at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>          
>>          On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Sandro Mani
>>          <manisandro at gmail.com> wrote:
>>                  So, what about creating groups for the various desktop
>>                  environments which pull in basesystem + xorg + mesa
>>                  drivers + displaymanager + bare desktop shell?
>>          
>>          
>>          Do the groups already provided in comps.xml[1] not work for
>>          this task?
>>          
>>          Currently, one can use yum's groupinstall option to install
>>          the gnome, kde, xfce, lxde, mate, and cinnamon desktops and
>>          desktop environments.
>>          
>>          Rich
>>
>>
>> Well, those groups are not exactly minimal.
> But minimal is not well defined. We have tried that at Mageia, and what
> i can say :
> - no one agree on what minimal mean
> ( cause everybody want something more later, or there is people
> complaining that minimal is too minimal )
I would define minimal as the absolute minimal set of packages which 
allows the shell to load. This resulting setup is not meant to be usable 
without the user installing additional packages he or she wishes. So 
such groups would not be meant for "normal" users (whatever that means), 
but for developers and power-users which want to build up their setup 
from the bottom up.
> - having minimal and non-minimal just confuse users, which were the
> primary target of having groups in the first place.
>
> So that was not working that well.
>
> So before asking for that, you should define minimal in term of features
> ( ie, not in term of packages, cause that's already too low level and
> was the cause of misunderstanding, because people didn't define the use
> case others than "I want to have this installed cause I said so" ).
>
> IE, what do you expect to work and what shouldn't.
> Because in the end, if what you want is just "kwin" or "gnome-shell",
> then just install them.
Well, that's what I usually do, but it still takes lots of time to 
figure out various other packages (which might very well be dependency 
bugs in the packages) which are missing. And generally the installation 
of such packages does not include core components of the graphical stack 
as dependencies (xserver, drm, mesa). Indeed, on my not-overly-minimal 
KDE setup, the package-cleanup --leaves --all list includes 
mesa-dri-drivers.
>
> Something we could do is to have a specific provide for each session,
> like "yum install session(gnome)" that would take what is needed to have
> "gnome" in *dm listed as a choice, and i think that would fit the
> definition of minimal.
As long as the session loads correctly, I perfectly agree!
>