A installation report...
hello debian users
I just send a bug reported on these experiences, but would like to get
some comments on this list:
I'm a very convinced Debian user and will never switch to another
distribution so I suggested a friend of mine to take a look on Debian,
which he tried to install. He is not a linux newbie, though Debian newbie
and tried to install Debian 1.3.1 from CD. Yesterday when I met him the
system was totally corrupted with round about 100 packages that weren't
in a clean state and it took several hours to fix this with dselect and
dpkg by hand.
One of the basic problems was that dselect can't say how many space is
free on the harddisk and if a selected package fits on the disk or
not. It installs all packages that are selected without any checking on
the disk and doesn't report anything to the user (only dpkg gets an disk
write error that is handled like any other). This resulted in "no
space left on device" errors and dselect wasn't even able to write its
status file. That's really ugly and one of the basic things a package
management system should be able of.
Then we deselected things for removing and many of the postrm-scripts
returned errors cause other packages that they needed were allready
removed. For example the linux gazette files from the doc directory
weren't able to be removed cause the journal package was allready wiped
from the disk. We managed this by installing the journal package one more
time and than removing the gazette files.
Another thing was that the netscape wrapper package from the contrib
implies to the user a full netscape package. We had no netscape binary
around and so the installation returned an error and netscape was half
installed. Then dselect reports conflicts on packages like fvwm95 or
others which have a "suggest netscsape" entry.
Well even if dselect provides facilities ro prevent users from running in
such problems, they are obviously hard to find. Btw: I'm not a very
experienced dselect user, cause I used dselect only once for my
installation and since then I'm doing the rest with dpkg on the command
line.
So I won't suggest a newbie to switch to the Debian distribution in the
next time. Well, on the other side I'm a glad Debian user and will never
take another distribution, cause I like the way the packages are set up
and how Debian organizes the disk.
Peter
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Peter Weiss, Sonnenstraße 17, D-26123 Oldenburg, Tel: 0441/ 81058
http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de:/~weissp
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