Re: Napster clients... Improvement of dselect

[Gediminas Paulauskas <menesis@delfi.lt>]

Fri, Mar 03, 2000 at 05:50:28AM -0800 rob wrote:
> 
> >  This is a wishlist thing, but I see in most of the man-pages, "see
> >  also".  It would be really nice if I could see "see also" things in
> >  package descriptions shown in dselect.

a "see also" feature will require additional work of mainainers, as they
should look at other similar packages available, though they are not
interested in any other. for example "ViM (see also Emacs)" - strange
comparison. Packages are classified by section, and if someone searches for
editor, it looks at text section... Just more search/filter/sort methods
needed. Some of them are already implemented in Gnome-apt. In the above
example, one should sort all packages by section, and then by priority, name
or main/non-free, so that all editors were in one place.

just maintainers should well consider what section their package belongs to,
so that such things like this one with napster clients would not occur.
> >  What do people think?
> 
> Personally i think it would be a great idea, i can also think of many
> improvements to dselect, including...
> 
> Ability to see what files a package will install

there is a utility in KDE called kpackage. It supports RPMs and DEBs. It can
show list of files installed by package, also show which files are broken,
changed or missing. 

Files which *will* install? every package has lots of files. Only
Packages.gz file from main branch is 800kB of size, and if lists of
installing files were included, they will grow several times.

> Ability to email the maintainer of a package by   launching pine, mutt etc

I think questions will raise only when package s already installed and has
problems or you want to send big THANKS to him. But great idea, on the other
hand. instead of `dpkg -p <package>`, looking for mail and sending a mail,
just look at dselect (deity?) and press 'm'...

> And much much more

yeah, much... one of them, that some people asked, was size, which will all
selected packages occupy when installed. Much windows applications' and other
linux' distributions installers check if there is enough space to install
and shows available and required sizes.

so... much to improve. What about aptitude, console-apt or deity? i still
prefer dselect...

-- 
                        menESIs        (Gediminas Paulauskas)