On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 16:47, Tom wrote: > On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 04:31:28PM +1100, Zenaan Harkness wrote: > > For a new user - !!in fact just about -any- user!! - navigating > > thousands of packages in dselect could consume days. At some point I > > stopped and went "ok, I'll just assume there's way more interesting > > programs here than I'll ever have time for in one lifetime, time to > > unselect everything I've selected over the last 6 hours, and install as > > I need/ discover something immediately useful at the time". > > I expect I'll eat these words, but I don't find the # of packages so > vast. My stategy is to basically never browse libs or libs-devel -- > they're just noise. I apt-get build-depends things like konqueror, > mozilla, and gnome-terminal, and most of things come on it. That fact that you know not to (and have even _heard_ of build-depends) is more than Aunt Tilly migrating from MSWindows will know. And for those of us who consider ourselves at least capable of knowing if we have an interest in a package, given its description, it simply takes many many hours to delve through the archive - and to do even more justice to understanding what's there, what's really going on, takes days. My point being, such users (as I personally experience) take a deep breath and go "let's check all of what's in Debian", and get inundated. It is simply too big to do in a day. So dselect (and even what little I've used of aptitude) are used out of necessity. (Perhaps modern guis are a bit better, I don't know though, as I gave up on these "simplifying" tools a couple of years ago and returned to the relatively sparse and clean interface of the command line. This works for me because I know I want vim, emacs, mozilla-firebird, mutt and evolution (and etc) and on any new box, can grad them in the time it takes to type in the command. > The rest of doesn't take *too* long to browse. Well, I'm sure there are different experiences of Debian - yours was obviously different to mine. cheers zen -- NEW! The Debian Enterprise Project: http://debian-enterprise.org/ Homepage: http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~zenaan/ PGP Key: http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~zenaan/zen.asc Please respect this email's confidentiality as sensibly warranted.
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