Re: Potato to Woody dist-upgrade problems
On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 01:47:38PM -0800, Thomas Zimmerman wrote:
> Perhaps part of the problem is that in every review of Debian, the
> reviewers rave about apt-get, not dselect (or aptitude.) _I_ don't
> use dselect either (it seems to leave my machine in a worse state
> then apt--for example: I don't know wtf it's trying to do, and I
> can't seem to get it to tell me. </rant>)
... and aptitude's UI is only slightly better than dselect.
What folks want is a "apt-get dist-upgrade" that doesn't require
navigating through a long list of possible packages. (Do you think
the average user has any understanding what "xfs" or "exim" means?)
Something that would really be helpful would be if "apt-get
dist-upgrade" asked the question, "do you want all of the following
extra suggested packages (will require an extra 50 megabytes) [Y/n]?"
That helps with the folks who get screwed because they lose
functionality when suggested packages aren't included, while still
making it relatively painless for naive users who just want to run a
command, and answer a few questions, no muss, no fuss, etc.
While I'm sympathetic to the whole attitude that upgrading should
require someone with half a clue, I'll note that Red Hat *only*
require half a clue, and its upgrade process (although it requires a
reboot), is remarkably smooth. The big question (for which I don't
know the answer) is whether the Debian developer community wants to
strive to be as easy to install as Red Hat, in the long run.
- Ted
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