Re: DSELECT question
On Jun 3, Fredrik Ax wrote
> On Mon, 2 Jun 1997, Alexander Stavitsky wrote:
>
> > Dselect in that respect works fine for me. I am however upset with dselect
> > when using cdrom/mounted access methods. In those cases dselect does want
> > to see all of the packages mentioned in Packages file present. Even those
> > that you've chosen not to install. It also ignored symlinks across
> > filesystems.
>
> I agree with you that it is a bit irretating that deselect scans for ALL
> pakages ... I can see that it's done for consistency reasons, BUT it would
> be great if there was a switch to turn this off.
I'm afraid you've got slightly the wrong end of the stick. ;) Using the
default methods, dselect scans through all *files* under the tree you
point it at, and for each one checks to see if it needs installing. There
are a few reasons for this, but mostly I think it was easier to write!
It's very annoying over NFS, where although it's not too slow a link,
going through all the files can easily take half an hour or more. It also
has other problems; for instance, if a package in the normal tree won't
install, it won't even get as far as trying the non-free and contrib
trees; think about (say) libmagick ... :(
In unstable (but not, I'm afraid, in frozen/stable, cos I wasn't quite
quick enough) is a package called dpkg-mountable, which finds the files
in a different way, avoiding this time-consuming scan, as well as doing
things like logging of the install. If you need it, you could install it
manually, but it's mostly only for convenience; unless you're fairly sure
what you're doing, you'd probably do better to steer clear of it,
especially as unstable is going over to use libc6 fairly soon.
Neither of these two methods, though, should have any problem with
symlinks.
&E
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Andy Mortimer, andy.mortimer@poboxes.com
http://www.poboxes.com/andy.mortimer
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