1.1 dselect stuff
Greetings,
I went over to a friends house last night and fired up his seldom-
used Debian Linux 1.1 partition to install gs and ghostview for him.
I thought I'd give a list of quirks I noticed even though a lot
of them are probably fixed.
1) Deselect detected the new packages and attempted to upgrade
everything. I actually thought this was kind of neat at first
until I realized how long 82MB of stuff takes to download over
a 28.8 link.
2) A bug in dpkg couldn't deal with zlib1's "Version: 1:4-6" line.
I suspect a perl regexp that should be (.*?):, not (.*): but anyway
that's probably been noticed & fixed in a more recent version of dpkg.
I guess what I'd suggest here is that dselect should know enough to
upgrade dpkg first before trying anything else. Also, this
bug crashed dpkg and dselect. I didn't appreciate being kicked
out of dselect so abruptly; it should handle dpkg errors, though
I was pleased that it didn't lose my changes to the package selection.
3) Dselect deletes uninstalled files (ones that encountered
installation errors) when it asks you "delete installed files?",
so that wasted line time from my perspective. Just because
dselect polices your initial package selection, it shouldn't
assume that the download completed and everything will be OK.
Keep aborted/incomplete .deb files unless told to purge them.
4) Deselect downloads the files in a random order (a perl hash
at work here no doubt:) What it should do is a DFS on the dependency
tree so that if your download is incomplete most of the files you
grabbed will still install. Perhaps it should also give priority
to packages in base/.
--
Brian S. Julin
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