Re: A proposal to improve dselect
Pete Templin <templin@bucknell.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jan 1997, Martin Konold wrote:
>> Actually why is the maintainer so silent?
> Perhaps you would be silent if discussions about your package were turning
> into some semi-serious bash N trash sessions.
If s/he (or you) interprets at least _my_ remarks as "bash N trash
sessions", we've misunderstood each other. I have no desire to put down
dselect and friends; I think the Debian package management is
wonderful, especially the dependency checking. I do, however, have
seconded some remarks (and made some myself) about serious problems with
the current user interface and functionality. As far as I'm concerned,
these remarks are intended in a positive way, i.e. to let the maintainer
know what problems were found, and to suggest improvements.
One of my most serious criticisms is the fact that in spite of the
dependencies being known, packages aren't installed in the right order.
If package 1 depends on package 2, then package 2 *must* be installed
*first*. This isn't done; I consider this a bug, that should be
reported. Perhaps it is important to recognize that different viewpoints
lead to different evaluations. I'm sure dselect does everything the
maintainer feels it should do, and in the right way - and from his/her
viewpoint s/he is probably right. My viewpoint is one of a *nix newbie,
used to DOS (is may not be much of an OS, but lots of *nix programs can
learn a lot about user-friendliness from DOS programs). It is important
for me to have an errorfree, even warning-free install - because I don't
know what to do with all these warnings. And I'm a commandline person -
imagine what it's like for someone used to W95?
> Keep in mind that we are all getting a generally fantastic product for the
> best price anyone could ask for.
Please don't bring in that "but it's free" stuff. I have great respect
for the fact that Debian is developed entirely by volunteers (in fact,
it being non-commercial is one of the reasons I chose this distribution
even though it would have cost me the same to get e.g. redhat).
Nevertheless, a lot of people depend on it now, and may expect the
maintainers to strive for improvement. (I second the "generally
fantastic" bit, BTW).
> That said, who is willing to coordinate efforts toward gathering
> suggestions for dselect, and what is the next step that we need to take?
There - this is what we were talking about! Not bashing, but gathering
suggestions for dselect! In my opinion, though, the next step is for the
maintainer of dselect to come out of hiding ;-) and tell us what s/he
thinks about the suggestions and problem reports so far.
Gertjan.
[PS - please don't Cc me in your messages directly - I'll get it via the
mailing list, thank you]
---
--
Gertjan Klein <gklein@xs4all.nl>
The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html
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