[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

[andré]

Hoyt Duff a écrit :
> On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 3:11 PM, andré<andr55 at laposte.net>  wrote:
>    
>> So far in simplified terms, for the "education" target, we have focus on
>> school boards in US/Canada and Australia/New Zealand; focus on regional
>> gov'ts in Germany.
>>      
Here I mean focus in terms of promotion, not in terms of the content of 
the DVD.
> Do you have a link to any Mandriva docs that detail how the package
> lists for different "targets" can be created and implemented?
>    
In short, it would be part of creating the installation DVD.

Mandriva does not implement this function in a manner useful to our 
purposes.
Let me explain.

There would be a number of install groups, (for want of a better 
expression), all on the same DVD.
Each group will have a list of packages to be installed, which could be 
individually selected/deselected as desired.
This is similar to what is already available on a Mandriva install DVD, 
with an important difference : install groups would not be mutually 
exclusive.

In other words, the "education" group (targeting school needs), the 
"young family" group (targeting families with young children), and the 
"home office" group, would probably all contain, for example, a version 
of OpenOffice (be it Go-oo, LibreOffice, or the officiel OpenOffice from 
Oracle/Sun).
Currently, on a Mandriva installation DVD, each application is in only 
one group.("Server" being one of their groups.)

Overlapping installation groups allows us to target many uses on the 
same DVD.
We could consider a target as a usage focus.
Many users would have more than one focus -- for example, developers 
would want various development tools, as well as maybe "home office" if 
they are an independant consultant.
There also could be a multi-level tree.  A global group for developers, 
with a sub-group for packagers (RPM tools), another for C/C++, another 
for Perl, etc.
Or for a potentially more common theme, a global group for education, 
with sub-groups for "pre-school/kindergarten", "elementary", 
"secondary", "post-secondary".
And these various subgroups would almost necessarily have overlaps.
The possibilities are only limited by our collective imaginations.

The more I think of this, I see an advantage of allowing the DVD 
installer to access an external group file, (on a usb memory key for 
example), for more flexibility on installation.
Especially useful to install the same software selection on a large 
number of computers -- without creating a custom installation DVD.

Think of the potential :)

- André (andre999)