Re: Upcoming Debian Releases [auto-post]
On Tue, 5 Nov 1996, Brian C. White wrote:
[snip]
>
> Bo
> ~~
[snip]
> - Improvements to 'dselect' (???) [2]
[snip]
> Footnotes
> ~~~~~~~~~
>
[snip]
> 2 - Dselect is our number one public relations problem. It's infelicities
> lead others to believe that the package management has flaws and some
> can't even get through it. One issue that was raised in a bug report was
> to NOT pop up the help screen everytime dselect notices a
> dependency/recommendation/conflict problem. I concur. I remember that
> that bug report suggested that dselect should not pop up the conflict
> resolution manager with its suggestions. I now disagree with that. The
> feedback that Debian /cares/ about you not breaking your system (and
> offers to suggest a resolution) is more important than the small
> frustration in a case one was about to select those packages anyway.
>
> Finally, I believe that dselect is too complex for a program that will
> only be used by novices once every six months! Perhaps having only
> options for
> + install, upgrade
> - unselect, ignore (NOT current semantics so maybe a bad idea?)
> r remove from system
> And some way to override defaults? Would this be sufficient?
Couldn't we discuss several improvements here and see how much work would
the be. I would suggest fixing the most severe things that make users
angry. As you said, dselect is "our number one public relation problem". I
totally agree. But then, we should at least discuss some problems and
perhaps try to fix them before rex is out.
dselect was the biggest problem I had when I switch over from slackware
and so it was to a few good friends of mine (that are all Linux hackers
;-) so it's not just the beginners that have troubles with it).
Here are my first suggestions--they shouldn't be much work but help users
a lot:
- display help screens only the first time on enters the selection
list and only the first time on gets into a conflict situation (the note
that '?' means help is enough, IMHO)
- handle recommends as suggestions (as you sais before): this is
really important I think. Otherwise there should be a way to say one don't
want to follow such a "recommendation". I've installed emacs and elvis
right now and elvis recommends "elvistags" which I don't need but
conflicts with emacs. I have to resolv this dependy conflict _every time_
I use dselect!
A lot of people would like Debian much more, if dselect was easier. Since
these things shouldn't be much work we should at least consider it to
solve them before rex (1.2) is out. Of course, these points perhaps need
some discussion.
Just my 2 cents,
Chris
-- _,, Christian Schwarz
/ o \__ schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@debian.org,
! ___; schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de, bm955877@muenchen.org
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