The task recipes we currently have aren't particularly useful. We need more of them and they need to be updated and provide useful functional units. This will need to start with an exercise in consultation with the community. Once we have actually established the groupings, actually updating the recipes is a trivial exercise. We may also want to consider renaming "task" to "package group" or some other more appropriate name (since "task" is already overloaded); we should also evaluate how these relate to items in IMAGE_FEATURES.
I've just posted an RFC to the OE/Yocto lists about this to gather ideas from the community: http://lists.yoctoproject.org/pipermail/yocto/2012-August/010955.html http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2012-August/027858.html http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/openembedded-devel/2012-August/041034.html
The bulk of this work has been done now and merged to master; some additional cleanups might be desirable in the 1.4 cycle particularly with packagegroup-base, packagegroup-core-basic, and packagegroup-core-lsb. There are too many commits to list, but they start at poky revision 5f0e3d8c89b70c424c956c19e61187486fc9b980.
Marking as verified, branch danny / c9de24d3f4845251b01e2eab0aeeb7472badc5bb