Re: potato -> woody upgrade not smooth...

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 12:03:15PM +0200, Joost Kooij wrote:
> 
> 2.  The problem is not in dselect, it is only the messenger.  The archive
> just contains a package set with inconsistent dependencies.  File a bug
> against the out of date library, or the ftp archive, for having broken
> Packages info.  It makes no sense to blame dselect for it.
> 

The problem is that dselect has a user interface which scares small
children.  Heck, it has an interface that scares kernel developers
with ten years of experience....

What I'd *like* to be able to do is to issue a command which displays
all of the packages for which new packages are eligible.  Today,
"apt-get -u upgrade" does a nice job of that, modulo not dealing with
recommended packages.  I don't want to wade through pages and pages
of packages to find out what's going to be installed.

So the user interface should basically have a way which shows me "the
packages that should be upgraded", and "the packages that should be
installed because of a new recommends header", and then after I give a
confirmation, goes ahead and does it.  Neither aptitude nor dselect
nor stormpkg provides that kind of functionality, as near as I can
tell.

So until something better comes along, I've generally restricted
myself to using "apt-get -u upgrade", followed by "apt-get -u
dist-upgrade" to update my system, because it's the easist.  If only
apt simply displayed all of the suggested packages, and then asked me
a yes/no question: "should I install all the suggested packages", it
would be close to perfect.

> You may blame dselect for its unusual key mapping.  But then, how can all 
> these smart people, who can master so many computer languages and programs,
> not learn to remember a handful of keys?  It baffles me, almost.

My complaints with dselect:

1) Nasty color scheme; I have a lot of trouble reading white text on a
black background, and the man page and gives no documentation on how
to change it.

2) Clumsy way of displaying the information.  I'm not interested in
seeing all of the packages in existence; there are too many of them.
I just want to see what packages are eligible for upgrading, and what
new packages are recommended as a result of upgrading.  

(Aptitude is close to the right thing, with its mutt style 'l'
command.  Now if it only had a ~U match pattern which matched only
packages to be upgraded.)

						- Ted