dselect (Re: testing is broken)
>>>>> "SG" == Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org> writes:
SG> The root problem with dselect is its insistance on evaluating
SG> "recommends" (and "suggests", but that causes less annoyance)
SG> each and every package each and every time it runs, rather than
SG> just when the package containg the recommends is (de-)selected,
SG> which makes recommends completely annoying for dselect users.
I don't think it's especially hard to fix it. Well, it's not trivial
either -- I spent about two or three hours once without getting it work
well, either the code around is not easily expandable or some trick must
be used.
BTW, I've never managed to incorporate my dselect changes (expansion and
hiding of sections, full description search, etc.) to the dpkg sources.
I'm pretty sure now that I won't work on it anymore (apt is good enough
and I run dselect only once in one or two years -- when new Debian
version is released), thus if anyone is interested to take over and
finish the work, please contact me.
SG> The memory issue is a minor implementation pecadillo by
SG> comparison.
Running dselect on my 8 MB RAM laptop is no longer possible. Running
bare dpkg there is painful enough. :-(
Milan Zamazal
--
If we are going to start removing packages because of the quality of the
software, wonderful. I move to remove all traces of the travesty of editors,
vi, from Debian, since obviously as editors they are less than alpha quality
software. -- Manoj Srivastava in debian-devel
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