Re: DSELECT question

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On Mon, 2 Jun 1997, Curt Howland wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> 
> Good morning,
> 
> I've installed from frozen, and run dselect a couple of times
> to snag interesting or "oops, needed that" packages since. I've
> found that each time, dselect selects for download many, many 
> packages that are of the same version as presently installed.

This is the first I have heard of this. (Not being argumentative at all
here) Thanks for the report.
> 
> Usually, these are the big ones as well. No wonder the FTP site
> is so often busy.
> 
> Question time: Is there any trouble I can get into by changing
> whole sections with "="? Is this the keystroke, as it seems to
> be, to "don't download it, leave it alone"?
> 
The "=", for those not familiar with dselect, is the symbol displayed
under "status" for the packages that are on Hold. The key that does this
is "H". I have always been disapointed by the fact that this key (and for
the most part all the other functionality) does not work on the heading
"All Packages" as this would be very helpful.
To cut a long story short, yes, putting packages on hold is the best way
to get dselect to take no action. I do this all the time when I want just
a few of the packages to be installed and don't want to upgrade anything
that I don't have to. Dselect's dependency checking is usually adequated
to the task, so you get told what additional packages may be needed for
the ones you want to install and function properly

> It seems that dselect, while correctly detecting the version
> locally and remotely, isn't making any distinction between what
> is already loaded and what is on the FTP site. This would seem
> to me to be a usefull and basic distinction, a reason for the
> creation of the dselect program and package system in the first
> place.

I think that this may be an artifact of the ftp method.

> 
> What am I missing?

The tools that will come out of the Deity development project ;-)

'Till then you seem to have a firm grasp on the problem.

Luck,

Dwarf
-- 
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      e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net     Tallahassee, FL  32308

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