Re: dselect survey
On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 19:32:35 -0800, Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 10:23:16PM -0500, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:
> > Maybe I'm still waiting for my first real problem to show up, but I
> > generally find dselect to be a real pleasure to use.
> >
> > Could you present an example of a problem you had with dselect? Honestly,
> > I wouldn't be using Debian today if not for dselect, which I see as being
> > a really nice selling point.
>
> If you really want to find out, go ask on debian-user. You'll find
> plenty of people more than willing to piss all over dselect.
Hi, I'm mostly a user, and just lurking on the lists to get a feel for
whether I want to
become a developer or not, but on this topic I will observe that the
dselect interface is
very cumbersome and non-intuitive until you get used to it. Having
"enter" exit the
selection process (rather than simply selecting the entry) is
perennially surprising,
and if I ake the tragic mistake of hitting enter twice based on the
muscle memory
of some other application, I find I may have already taken actions I
wasn't quite ready
to take. Selecting packages, and their dependencies, can be confusing.
In general,
for safety and for confidence, I prefer to apt-get exactly the package
and its dependencies
that I have researched through the web interface.
I have done something terrible to one system: which was a stable
distribution. For a
project, I needed to obtain a package versioned in the unstable
distribution. I foolishly
thought I could simply change the settings for dselect to grab that
one package, but
now dselect thinks it needs to change the package version of just
about every package
on my system, and I am reasonably sure letting it make that change
will irreparably
damage the system. So, until I deprecate that machine and rebuild it
from scratch,
I don't use debian tools on it at all any more. I presume there is a
better way to grab
a single package (and its dependencies) if one needs a different
version than is available
in "stable". I am sure there are other ways to damage a system using
dselect, but my
main gripes are interface: having to scroll or search through
thousands of rather garbagy ackages to find what I want is just
useless, the moreso if I don't know the exact package
name. The web interface to finding packages is a zillion times better,
and apt-get is
simple and safe. (If I can apt-get a package versioned outside my
overall distribution,
that would be perfect.)
-bluejack
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