[suggestion] :confusing dselect urge for agressive upgrade
Hi everyone,
I'm not sure if that's the good place for a suggestion post, please
apologize if it's not. Maybe that has been discussed before as well,
though I could no find anything in the archives.
dselect has the default behavior that successfully installed packages
are marked as 'installed ok install' in the package status file. That
means, as far as I could infer, something like :
"package installed, do upgrade without question if newer version found"
and this has the consequence, that after a standard CD ROM install, the
first time you connect to a ftp distribution site, dselect spontaneously
offers you to download nty *Megabytes* of archives, even if you've only
selected a few new small packages. (Which is very confusing the first
time, and can be very tedious with a small modem line.)
The standard way to oper is apparently to set all installed packages on
hold "installed ok hold", to prevent dselect from trying to agressively
upgrade them. But this can't be done in an easy way in dselect, so one
has to use apt --get-setection and apt --set-selection. So here is my selection:
Why not have dselect set a package on 'installed ok hold' by default
after installation, and add 2 new entries in the dselect menu to
globally unhold / hold the complete set of installed packages. This
would greatly simplify the way most users use dselect (i.e. making a
base install, and have it stay stable for a while, while downloading
some new packages), and would not prevent for a global 'upgrade'
download of the installed packages when required.
I've seen that a replacement for dselect is underway as deity. Maybe
this behavior has been considered for it, if not I would greatly
apprciate it.
Best regards
Francois
--
Francois Taiani LAAS-CNRS (http://www.laas.fr)
Ph.D. Student Dependable Computing
http://www.laas.fr/~ftaiani and Fault Tolerance
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