New to Debian; emacs20 broken after fresh install of Hamm.

[Ruud Janssen <janssen@ipo.tue.nl>]

Hi,

I'm new to Debian (not to Linux though; I've used RedHat for some time 
now). I did a fresh FTP install of Hamm yesterday, choosing the "Sci.
Workstation" profile to avoid/postpone a manual package selection using
dselect. All went okay, except for the emacs20 package.

It won't get installed (as well as emacs20-el, auctex, psgml and w3-el,
since they depend on it). During the configuration stage in dselect
I get screens full of error messages regarding references to free
variables. Anyone had this problem too? Should I upgrade to a version
in Slink?

My first impression: Debian does not meet up with its reputation of
being hard to install or configure. Used to installing RedHat RPM 
packages, I especially liked the post-install configuration scripts
(answer a few questions and you're ready to go) instead of RedHat's
pre-defined package configurations.

By adding the install stage in which "task profiles" can be selected, 
the manual package selection using dselect can be avoided because a 
sensible pre-selection of packages has already been made. In this way
the installation gets about as easy as RedHat's, and dselect simply
becomes a powerful tool (without an equivalent in RedHat) for
maintaining the packages instead of the most difficult part of the 
installation. Shouldn't this be mentioned in the install guide?

Thanks,

Ruud.