Re: first draft "aptitude howto"

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu>]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2000 at 02:33:43AM -0500, Branden Robinson was heard to say:
> > aptitude is a front-end to apt and dpkg, the Debian GNU/Linux Package
> > Management tools. It tries to provide a nice user interface to every-day
> > package management on Debian GNU/Linux Systems.
> 
> Given the fact that we support the Hurd as well, it might be more accurate
> to start migrating to just saying "Debian systems".

  Well, actually, last I heard apt didn't even compile on the Hurd (or BSD)
without a nontrivial amount of work.  So this is currently accurate :-)

  Also, I'm not sure aptitude will compile on either of those systems; once
the Debian ports are reasonably stable (and, more importantly, I get another
system to work on), I'll see if there are any Linux dependencies in it.

  [snip]

> (Remark: I think I would find the overloading of the '-' key confusing.
> Please consider using a different key for hold operations.  'h' seems
> intuitive but might be pressed by novices as an attempt to get help.  '!'
> seems like another possible candidate for hold, a la "Stop!"  "Wait!"
> "Achtung!" :) )

  I've thought back and forth about this.  It made sense at the time --
basically, I thought that "+" and "-" are opposites and should cancel one
another.  Currently there is a separate hold key, defaulting to "=" for
dselect refugees.  I may make bindable keys for pure selection and pure
deselection, but that will have to wait until at least 0.0.8; 0.0.7 is nearly
ready to go as soon as I squash a hard-to-trigger segfault and rewrite all
the documentation (I may want to include this document or something like it in
that revision).

> > Additional Keys in aptitude include '/' for searching, 'home', 'end',
> > 'up', and 'down' for navigation.
> 
> (As a die hard vi user, I suggest making 'j' and 'k' also perform
> navigation operations as well.  :) )

  They do in CVS :)

> > (todo: find the right names for those colors :)
> > white  = normal
> > red    = broken
> > green  = install
> > turkis = remove
> 
> Do these reflect current status, or the desired action to be taken?
> 
> I don't know what "turkis" means; I guess I'll have to try aptitude out to
> learn.  :)

  Action to be taken, except for the broken color.  (see my other comment,
not yet written, for corrections)

> > bl n wh= hold
> 
> What?
> 
> > cyan   = update (same as green but alrady installed).
> > 
> > Also in the 0.0.4a version a split screen view with package details and a
> > key help menu is missing.
> 
> It would really suck to ship without a help screen.  Dark might be
> persuaded to let in such a documentation-only revision.

  I can take a look at backporting the help facilities if there's interest.
It's very simple; it just displays a text file in an internal pager.

  Daniel