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Re: Thoughts regarding package installation



Christoph Lameter:
> 1. The updating of configuration files should be handled more
>    intelligently.

I agree with this, although I think sub-point C requires a bit
more thought.

> 2. There are too many questions when upgrading packages.

I agree with this as well. It's sometimes unavoidable, I
think (how do you decide what the hostname of a system is,
since you can't use a fixed default when installing on a live
network?), but it would be good to be able to do things more
automatically. Especially when installing Debian on a lot of
identical computers at once. It would be a good idea to be
able to install Debian once, and then copy the answers to the
new machines.

> 3. dselect is not able to handle the number of packets that we have
>    anymore. Long lists of stuff have to be handled in a huge list. You

The dselect user interface should be re-designed. Ian's done a
great job with the whole dpkg package, but this needs to be fixed
one day. Preferably before we get a huge number of new people.
(Or did we already?) My own ideas involve things that are very
similar to the Turbo Pascal text mode interface.

Ian knows dselect is sub-optimal, but he doesn't have time to fix
it. It's a big job. This is one of the cases where things really
do need to be designed carefully before they're implemented. 

Do we have anyone on board who could make a draft design for
the new interface? Don't worry about implementation, that will
happen once we have a design. Experience with our packaging
system and general user interface guidelines would be definite
plus.

> 4. On installing Debian dselect should NOT be called unless an expert mode
>    is selected. The user should be presented a couple of standard sets of
>    packages to be installed and pick one of those.

That would probably make things easier, yes.

> 5. If a package is to be purged then the system should not accept any
>    failure of any script to give up.

I'm not so sure about this one, but I'll leave it to those who
actually understand dpkg.

> 6. It should be possible to do  "dpkg -i apache" for example and dpkg

Hmm, yes, though I think that's more dselect's job. Not that I oppose
adding this feature as well.

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