Re: Really unhappy with one dselect behavior...
On Mon, Mar 15, 1999 at 05:16:51PM -0600, Rob Browning wrote:
> The big problem is that when you accidentally do hit return, there's
> *no* way to recover from the mistake. The state information about
> which packages are new is immediately chunked. Your only recourses
> are to either hope you didn't miss anything important (or anything
> that you'd really like), or to allocate an hour or two to go through
> the hundreds and hundreds of unselected packages, hoping you can find
> any important ones you missed.
yep. this is my only real complaint against dselect. apart from this
it's a great program and i expect i'll keep on using it even when the
GUI interface for apt is finished.
it sucks. the only way to avoid it is to be extremely patient and
careful when using dselect. i've got into a habit of using the cursor
keys before hitting return as a simple test, especially if i've just hit
return and dselect hasn't responded yet...it lets me find out if dselect
is just being slow or if my return key is just being dodgy.
> Even if you don't accidentally hit the return key, the current
> behavior makes it completely impossible to go through the list of new
> packages in more than one session. It's all or nothing. Once you
> enter the "Select" phase, you cannot exit until finishing without
> losing all the new package info.
you can press "X" to exit without saving changes. if you're not
completely sure that you want dselect to register all your changes, hit
"X" rather than "Q" or "<return>".
far from ideal, but better than nothing.
> What I'd love to see is, at least, a config option or something that
> when active, made dselect ask you for confirmation on leaving the
> select screen (before going into final conflict resolution),
YES!!
> better than that would be to switch things so that dselect doesn't
> clobber the list of new packages on "selection" exit, but rather at
> the begin of the install run. This would make it much easier to go
> through the new packages in several sittings.
i don't think this is possible. the install run uses the saved
selections list (/var/lib/dpkg/status) to decide what to
install/remove/purge.
craig
--
craig sanders
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