Re: dselect complaints
On Sun, 19 May 1996, William S. Gribble wrote:
> Ian Jackson wrote:
> > I'm not interested in hearing any more complaints or even extensive
> > suggestions for improvement, unless the person complaining is
> > volunteering to do the work on a new interface.
>
> If you don't want feedback about the tools, might I suggest that you
> give up their maintenance to someone who does? Dselect as it exists
> is nothing more or less than a working prototype of the tool it needs
> to be.
I believe you have missed the point. Ian knows that the dselect user
interface is not what it should be, and has received extensive suggestions
for improvements. He doesn't have time to work on these suggestions at the
moment, so sending him more suggestions is not a terribly useful thing to
do. It isn't a matter of ego, or a belief that the user interface is
good. It's just time.
> What needs to happen, in my opinion:
>
> 1. Make the release of debian-1.1 public, when outstanding bugs are fixed.
> Emphasize alternatives to dselect in the documentation. Make it
> clear that dselect is still a working prototype rather than a finished
> product. Provide script(s) to handle several common initial-installation
> scenarios, with instructions about how to use dpkg to install more or
> remove unwanted packages.
I believe this is sensible - dpkg should be better documented anyway.
> 2. Open a period of discussion to draft a new specification for dselect,
> using the lessons learned from the current version as a starting point.
> 3. Rewrite dselect to meet the new specification.
Who is going to do this?
There have been many separate suggestions for package management user
interfaces, but so far nobody has made any move towards implementing them.
I think that the only way we're going to find out what the best interface
is is to implement them all (at least partially) and see which work. This
doesn't all have to be done by the same person.
Steve Early
sde1000@cam.ac.uk
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