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. -- Please read <http://www.iki.fi/liw/mail-to-lasu.html> before mailing me. Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.
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