ubuntu-meta metapackages could be more flexible

Colin, what's your feeling on adding pure virtual packages to germinate? (ick)

Why not just make telnet-ssl the base package? It's only fractionally larger
than plain telnet and it interoperates with non-SSL telnetd in both directions,
and the base system already includes libssl due to openssh-client. I don't see
why we shouldn't simply make the SSL version the default.

If, eventually, a reason emerges why both are needed, it would be relatively
straightforward to make the packages coexist via alternatives rather than conflict.

Is it actually the same upstream source, compiled differently? If so, then I
don't mind adding it to base instead of plain telnet (assuming its dependencies
are met).

If it's a different upstream, I'd rather not

I think the fundamental problem is that germinate doesn't have virtual package
support (I just learned about it 15 min. ago, so kick me if I'm wrong). There
are many cases in which you might want alternative software running (in
particular, people reasonably tend to like to choose their own
mail-transport-agent and system-log-daemon), but you still want to keep
ubuntu-base around to help upgrade to the next version.

(let's use this bug to represent all of the similar issues with packages in the
base and desktop seeds)

I talked with Colin about this a while ago, and in the course of the discussion
I considered that using Recommends may be appropriate. They have the semantics
we want: install this package by default if the user hasn't seen it before, but
allow it to be uninstalled if they later decide they don't want it.

The major obstacle (as with other uses of Recommends) is that different apt
frontends handle them differently, due to there being no support for Recommends
in apt proper.

*** Bug 11874 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 11987 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 12351 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 12930 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Some greater granularity is definitely needed in the metapackages. Not sure
what "germinate" is, though. For desktop installation, for example, a bare
minimum to get the desktop up and going would be in ubuntu-desktop-essential.
Then other, mutually indepentent packages could be dependent on that. So a
minimum multimedia install could be unbuntu-desktop-multimedia, which would be
dependent on essential. Maybe ubuntu-desktop-multimedia-extended would more
stuff beyond just the basics, and would be dependent on multimedia.

Those of us who want to remove some of the stuff that we will never use,
evolution for example, or possibly Open Office if you use an alternative to
that, shouldn't miss important changes that get pushed out because the one,
giant, monolithic ubuntu-desktop package got broken.

Same should apply to ubuntu-base. Haven't dug into this, but there are likely
things here I might want to remove/replace at some point. Also it is likley
there are many packages in base that ubuntu-desktop doesn't actually need. So
here, again, an ubuntu-base-essential would be appropriate, along with a number
of parallel packages all dependent on essential that would add/extend
functionality of the base system.

I know the idea is to keep installation simple and down to as few clicks as
possible, but really, I don't think "ubuntu-desktop-mulimedia" or
"ubuntu-desktop-office-suite", for examples, would be too confusing.

*** Bug 17291 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I think that, regarding the comments, this bugs is confirmed.

Feel free to reject it, of course.

FYI, the supporting infrastructure needed in the packaging system to improve this situation is being worked on here;

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/recommends-support

Michael Vogt has implemented the infrastructure for this, and I've committed some seed changes corresponding to the duplicates of this bug report and other discussions on this topic:

------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 799
committer: Matt Zimmerman <email address hidden>
branch nick: edgy
timestamp: Fri 2006-09-08 13:47:25 -0700
message:
  Convert more packages to recommends:

  - desktop/gnome-screensaver: allow xscreensaver to be used (bug #42668)
  - standard/openssh-client: allow for ssh-krb5 to be used (bug #52609)
  - standard/mtr-tiny: allow mtr to be removed (bug #11874)
------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 798
committer: Matt Zimmerman <email address hidden>
branch nick: edgy
timestamp: Fri 2006-09-08 13:39:21 -0700
message:
  Convert more desktop stuff to recommends:

  - Daemons that some users prefer to remove (powernowd, bluez-*, hplip
  - i18n (scim, non-Latin fonts)
  - Accessibility packages
  - gcc, make
  - example-content

They'll take effect with the next metapackage update.