Re: Is this really the right thing to do?
[...]
> > X-+-xbase
> > |
> > +-xservers
> > |
> > +-xfonts
> >
This looks good. Of course the groups should be collapsable so
the user can get where he wants fast.
>
> Yes, this is what I was thinking of. Right now the only way to
> 'associate' packages with one another, besides the section name, is to
> use a common prefix in the name so they show up together in the same
> place in dselect's screen. Imagine a user looking at the huge list of
> packages (in X11 section) that start with 'x'. Yes, the dependencies
> will auto-select most of the necessary packages if one is picked by the
> user, but when I did this by picking xbase, I believe 'xterm' never got
> auto-selected, nor is the user made aware of other 'significantly
> related' packages like the other xfont and xserver packages. How would
> a new user with little experience with Unix/X11 know he needs 'xterm'?
>
xterm isn't necessary, I use rxvt instead, and the splitting of X11
let me install without xterm, which is good.
The problem of needing *some* sort of terminal can be solved by having
both xterm and rxvt provide the same "terminal" capability, and have
x-base suggest the "terminal" stuff. It shouldn't depend on it though,
one can imagine an useful x-installation without a terminal.
> There is one other 'association' issue that is getting worse. Imagine
> selecting the gnome package suite. When I did this recently, I ended up
> with more than *30* packages being selected for gnome support. Now
> suppose the user wants to remove gnome to try out KDE, for example (lets
> just assume they are mutually exclusive). There is no reasonable way
> for this user to figure out which installed packages were installed for
> gnome. I guess what I'm suggesting is that the packages need to
> 'remember' *why* they were selected, by the user, or auto-selected
> because of dependency requirements on a given package. When the user
> goes to delete gnome from his system, the other packages that were
> installed only because of dependencies, can 'inform' the user, somehow,
> that they are no longer needed.
An option for showing only those packages that nothing depends on
could be useful. Or a flag for every installed package showing if
there is dependencies.
Helge Hafting
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