So, what about creating groups for the various desktop environments which pull in basesystem + xorg + mesa drivers + displaymanager + bare desktop shell?

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Rich Mattes <richmattes(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Sandro Mani <manisandro(a)gmail.com&gt;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.

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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(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Sandro Mani > <manisandro(a)gmail.com&gt; 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 )

- 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.

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.

On 2013-04-29 19:49 (GMT+0200) Sandro Mani composed: > Michael Scherer wrote: >> minimal is not well defined. > 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. I agree. Maybe a better word than minimal would be foundational (dependent in the generic sense of the word).

On 29/04/13 16:58, Sandro Mani wrote: > On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Rich Mattes wrote: >> On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Sandro Mani 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? > Well, those groups are not exactly minimal. We already have one set of minimal desktop functionality defined by the critical path groups. There are groups for GNOME, KDE, LXDE, XFCE. I am not sure how much they cover for other desktops, but the GNOME critical path group should (hopefully) be enough to bring up a minimal Shell. On 30/04/13 01:49, Sandro Mani wrote: > To make an example: > gnome3: "Minimal Install" + mesa-dri-drivers xorg-x11-server-Xorg > xorg-x11-drivers gnome-session-xsession gnome-shell telepathy-logger > (and possibly control-center) Does this work for you well enough? # yum install @critical-path-gnome

> (FWIW, I guess telepathy-logger should be a dependency of gnome-shell) I'll look into adding the telepathy-logger dep to gnome-shell. I guess something should have a dep on gnome-session-xsession as well, possibly also gnome-shell.

Hope this helps, Kalev

On 2013-05-01 01:37 (GMT+0200) Sandro Mani composed: >> # yum install @critical-path-gnome > The gnome one is close, the kde one not: critpath contains kdelibs and > kdm, but a minimal set would rather look like > base + xorg + mesa + kdm kde-workspace dejavu-sans-fonts > dejavu-sans-mono-fonts > (here it might be a good idea to have the dejavu-sans-fonts as > dependencies of kdm / kde-workspace?) Why only DejaVu (which along with Verdana and Vera have the significantly largest average x-height and width of common western web fonts)?

What good are TTF/OTF fonts without Xorg? Mesa aka 3D? Bling I don't need, or want no matter how fast the system, and I force it globally with Option "Composite" "Disable" somewhere in /etc/X11/.

If anything is going to require fonts it should be X if not base. On my systems the top priority fonts are the Droids, with nearly as much x-height as D/V/V, but not so fat.

Le Mer 1 mai 2013 02:17, Sandro Mani a écrit : > On 01.05.2013 02:08, Felix Miata wrote: >> On 2013-05-01 01:37 (GMT+0200) Sandro Mani composed: >> >>>> # yum install @critical-path-gnome >>> The gnome one is close, the kde one not: critpath contains kdelibs and >>> kdm, but a minimal set would rather look like >>> base + xorg + mesa + kdm kde-workspace dejavu-sans-fonts >>> dejavu-sans-mono-fonts >>> (here it might be a good idea to have the dejavu-sans-fonts as >>> dependencies of kdm / kde-workspace?) >> Why only DejaVu (which along with Verdana and Vera have the >> significantly largest average x-height and width of common western web >> fonts)? >> > Aren't the dejavu fonts those which are mapped to the standard sans, > serif and monospace fonts? (could very well be wrong here). >> What good are TTF/OTF fonts without Xorg? Most our fonts are mapped to the relevant generic aliases, mapping them is part of our standard font packaging process. Dejavu tend to be preferred over other fonts when installed because it has decent glyphs for a lot of scripts, but nothing prevents you from running a Fedora system with other fonts now (or even specifying different priorities in /etc). A lot of other fonts have 'nicer' glyphs for specific scripts. What they usually lack is consistent quality over large coverage, it's easy to draw a few hundred glyphs, i18n requires a lot more. Hardcoding specific fonts in package deps only leads to sterile debates about the best font to hardcode, and always angers part of the users, since none of the existing fonts has wide and good enough coverage to satisfy all user groups (that's why @fonts is a group with *lots* of default entries).

(here it might be a good idea to have the dejavu-sans-fonts as dependencies of kdm / kde-workspace?)

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 07:49:23PM +0200, Sandro Mani wrote: > 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. How about a lightweight desktop environment (it would just come with twm/fvwm or similar plus a terminal - I'm sure this exists already)? Does it need to be a minimal GNOME or KDE? Rich.

The key to minimizing a desktop IMHO is getting a lighter browser. It's really hard to use a machine without a browser these days, and both Firefox and Chromium are humongous. They've got great JavaScript engines but who needs all that other stuff?

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Sandro Mani <manisandro(a)gmail.com <mailto:manisandro@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 [1] https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/comps.git/tree/comps-f19.xml.in

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That said, if someone wanted to do the exploration, come up with those minimal package sets and propose them for inclusion to comps.xml (with the blessing of the related desktop SIG), I have no problems with it myself.

From time to time, when setting up virtual machines for testing, I miss a fast way to install the minimal set of packages which allows me to boot into the desktop of a desktop environment. Currently, I do a minimal install, then install some core component, i.e. gnome-shell, and then hunt the logs to find out which other packages are missing.

So, what about creating groups for the various desktop environments which pull in basesystem + xorg + mesa drivers + displaymanager + bare desktop shell?

Advantages I see are: * Users can quickly set up test environments for various desktop environments * It would make side-by-side installation of desktop environments more pleasant * It might help considering enabling the yum option "clean_requirements_on_remove=1" by default, since even if something goes wrong, the user will not end up with a missing desktop next time he or she reboots * It might help fixing some package dependencies

Opinions?