Re: Idea for the burner
On Thu, 6 Mar 1997, William Chow wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 7 Mar 1997, J.P.D. Kooij wrote:
>
> >
> > Like, dselect is a great and easy tool, but there is no manpage for it...
>
> Dselect is pretty intuitive once you get the hang of it, but it needs to
> be a bit better before I call it a great and easy tool. There were a
> couple of times that dselect purged things I didn't want to, because I
> didn't go through the whole list and checked everything, etc.
> I think dselect needs to be layed out better, but to tell you the truth, I
> have no idea how to represent that amount of information in an easy to
> read format. The current system is workable, but I don't believe it
> necessarily is ideal. This is probably due to the side effect of having a
> LOT of packages in the Debian system. While it may be a headache to run
> dselect and go through all those packages, I guess it's better than having
> very few packages...
>
I will say that I really like dselect. I have never felt the need to
sort through how to use dpkg since I use dselect for all of my package
installation and removal.
However, I think dselect could benefit alot from an option that will allow
you to display the changes which are selected before you actually jump in
and do them. I to have had dselect either install or remove packages that
I didn't intend (no doubt because I made some stupid slip of the fingers).
But, in any case, it might be nice to preview what is going to be done
before actually doing it.
There are far to many packages to be able to confidently go through the
selection process and know exactly what is going to be done. It would be
tragic to accidently purge the x-windows configuration files or something
like that.....
>
> >
> > Also, I think it would be better to drop info (sorry, you die-hards GNUdes
> > out there.) Lets have all the info stuff as lynx-enabled HTML, it provides
> I believe you can have the best of both possible worlds with convertors.
> That way you can have HTML/postscript/texinfo/whatever sources of
> essentially the same document. Not everyone will have lynx, and not
> everyone will use texinfo, etc.
>
I hate to step on any toes here, but we certainly need something in
addition to info. I understand that emacs does a nice job with these
files, but I have never felt like I had the system resources to spend on
emacs, and I have never had the stamina to work through info.....
Two things that I think might be nice in the ``getting started'' type
documentation for Debian would be more information on using dselect, and
a section on other places to look for documentation. I just skimmed back
through the documentation used for my Debian install last fall (I am a
convert from slackware) and I find no mention of the /usr/doc directory,
info (for what it is worth), the basic Linux HowTo's, or even man pages.
The man pages, while obvious to those who have used u*ix for a while may
are not so obvious to a newbie or even someone who has used u*ix for a while
as a general user.
Seems like a mention of all of the available documentation (web address
included) would be nice to put out there. It might help get people
started on solving their problems.
Scott
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