Re: dSELECT

["E.L. Meijer (Eric)" <tgakem@sg10.tue.nl>]

> Ill start this off with the usual caveats, Im new to linux in general,
> as well as debian. My problems, however, seem to be with the dselect
> program. I have read the minimal help pages within dselect, as well
> as the linux install faqs and the (frankly next-to-useless) dselect
> beginner file. I also checked the debian-user archives, and while I found
> a lot
> of problems with dselect, none of the solutions fixed mine.
> 
> The system Im using: (Im pretty sure this is irrelevent)-
> TI TM6020 notebook, P120, 8 Mgs, Active Color,...
> 
> I installed the base off of dos disks and everything went very, very
> smoothly (For some reason, I thought that was going to be the
> hard part, guess not).  
> 
> As for the packages, I decided that it would be easiest for me to d/l
> the important stuff, or at least as much as I could, and install from a
> zip disk. I didnt have a problem getting dselect to read the zip disks
> nor the packages contained therein. In fact, many of the packages
> installed
> smoothly. Some of them, however, did not. Most of my problems were with
> xwindows files, Ill try to boil this down to some questions.
> 
> 1. When installing I got pre-dependency and other dependency errors...
> shouldnt dselect have told me about these _before_ it started installing?
> This isnt exactly intuitive (nor is it in any help files Ive seen). Before
> you
> respond with the obvious, yes, all of the files which I had selected,
> were, in
> fact, on the zip disk. Why isnt dselect showing ALL the dependencies?

Dselect does show all the dependencies.  The problem is that dselect
isn't installing packages in the right order automatically.  A successor
to dselect is in the works that will do better in this respect: the
deity project.

It is possible to change the order of installation in dsleect, but I
never got around to understanding how to do that, or even to understand
from within dselect what the order should be.

My manual approach is the following.  I start by picking an important
package I need, try to install that manually using
dpkg --install <file name of package>
This fails.  In the error message I can see on what other packages this
package predepends.  Then I try to install these packages again using
dpkg --install ...  Usually I have some luck that certain packages
install.  Sometimes conflicting packages have to be removed using dpkg
--purge.  If I succeed to install the particular package I picked, I go
back to dselect, select the other packages, and see if it will work this
time.  If you have all the files you need, usually one or two cycles
will do most of the trick.  Packages you will want to install are in
stable/binary and stable/binary-all.  The files called `Packages.gz'
contain the information which file names correspond to what package.
Note that some packages are provided by others.  This information is
also in the Packages.gz files.

I agree this is not what you would call `painless package
instalation/upgrade', so all moral support (maybe more) should go to
the deity project.  On the other hand, writing an extension to dselect
to properly sort the packages should be a smaller project than deity is,
and would be very welcome indeed.  Procedures like I described above are
probably a bit too much for unix newbies, and we shouldn't scare
beginners away from Debian IMO.

Eric Meijer

-- 
 E.L. Meijer (tgakem@chem.tue.nl)          | tel. office +31 40 2472189
 Eindhoven Univ. of Technology             | tel. lab.   +31 40 2475032
 Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (TAK) | tel. fax    +31 40 2455054


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