[Pkg-lxde-maintainers] Bug#591978: tasksel: lxde-desktop install includes gnome (non-d-i invocation)

[Ben Armstrong]

Package: tasksel
Version: 2.81
Severity: normal

Calling tasksel from the command-line (as live-helper does in chroot_tasks)
instead of via d-i, if you try to install lxde-desktop, it will include gnome.
While not a serious problem for most users, it is very serious for debian-live,
since lxde is supposed to be our lightest desktop and ends up being actually
larger than gnome itself.

The good news is that it can be worked around (thanks, Joey Hess for the tip)
by preseeding debconf.  But this is not at all obvious to the developer trying
to install tasks, so has the appearance of being broken.

This is what worked for me:

echo tasksel tasksel/desktop select lxde | debconf-set-selections

And then the install proceeds normally without pulling in GNOME.

Please fix tasksel so we don't have to hack around it to make installing
the lxde-desktop task do the expected thing. The intuitively obvious thing
for 'install lxde-desktop' is that only lxde-desktop should be installed and
not gnome.

Thanks,
Ben

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_CA.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages tasksel depends on:
ii  aptitude                      0.6.3-3    terminal-based package manager (te
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.33     Debian configuration management sy
ii  liblocale-gettext-perl        1.05-6     Using libc functions for internati
ii  tasksel-data                  2.81       Official tasks used for installati

tasksel recommends no packages.