the net installer doesn't install gnome-vanilla

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I was able to recreate this in Bionic today.

There is no vanilla-gnome-desktop task in the archives.

 sudo apt-get install vanilla-gnome-desktop^
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package vanilla-gnome-desktop^
E: Couldn't find task 'vanilla-gnome-desktop'
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'vanilla-gnome-desktop^'

bionic: the seed is not running
artful: seed seems to be running, but its in the archive as ubuntu-gnome-desktop not vanilla-gnome-desktop

so apparently there is something wrong with the artful seed
and we need to get the bionic seed running again (since I am pretty sure that is what is required to get the Task into the archives)

It looks like some changes were made to tasksel previously which need to modified again.

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/339723238/tasksel_3.34ubuntu8_3.34ubuntu9.diff.gz

Strangely there is a vanilla-gnome-desktop package found into synaptic, but its changelog shows:

ubuntu-gnome-meta (0.82) bionic; urgency=medium

  * Refreshed dependencies
  * Removed fonts-nanum from desktop-recommends (LP: #1581160)
  * Removed fonts-takao-pgothic from desktop-recommends

 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Sat, 11 Nov 2017 14:06:53 -0500

Brian, I may be way off track here since its been a long time since I looked at tasksel, however doesnt it essentially run:

apt-get install <flavour>^
Which then installs packages based on Task: fields in Packages.gz?
(looking at the source, that seems to apply for the ubuntu-seeds?)

Now there is an ubuntu-gnome-desktop Task in artful, but I dont think that was intended, it was meant to be renamed to vanilla-gnome-desktop along with the rename of the meta package.

The only thing that was not renamed, was the bzr repos, so the patch looks ok to me in that respect.

Is there some way to make tasksel use the meta package instead of the Task embedded in the archive?

We could make tasksel use the package instead of tasks for this one specific task (which would be more reasonable, IMO, than cluttering the archive with a task that doesn't relate to any official flavours), but that also leads to the question of should tasksel be offering a task that isn't related to any flavours? Maybe we should have removed it from tasksel, not renamed it.

To be clear, there are *many* "generic-desktop-environment" packages in the archive, and tasksel doesn't have support for any of the others. I don't see why vanilla-gnome should be a special snowflake here.

Here is a patch to fix vanilla-gnome task. Had to jump through a few hoops to generate it, since lubuntu does not have a bionic seed apparently, so the debian/rules update target is broken.

Hello, apologies for the delay on any update here.

If you would like this patch to go into Bionic, could you please edit the bug description to follow the SRU bug format? That can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#SRU_Bug_Template

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Thanks!