Re: no wonder...
On 7 Apr, Kent West wrote:
> Richard Taylor wrote:
>
>> On 4/6/2000, 9:03:41 PM, Oki DZ <okidz@pindad.com> wrote regarding Re:
>> no
>> > On 5 Apr 2000 pumpkins@dizzy.ee.itb.ac.id wrote:
>>
>> > > No wonder people say that Debian is the most difficult
>> > > Unix-clone distro to install and use...
>> > ...
>> > > Another thing, is the dselect program: it is quite
>> > > difficult to use...
>>
>> As compared to something like... say... notepad?
>>
>> What's difficult about selecting things from a menu?
>
> I really shouldn't add to the noise on this thread, but I'm going to anyway.
>
> 1. Nothing's difficult about selecting things from a menu. It's when those selections
> bring up other screens wanting to add/delete other things, which affect other things,
> which makes the user want to get out, and none of the keystrokes seem to work like a
> beginner (not someone who has read the docs and EXPERIENCED the experience) would
> expect. There's just a host of things that are difficult about deselect and apt.
> There's a host of good about these products also; they're just not intuitive for the
> non-initiated.
>
I agree that this probably isn't the most appropriate forum for
discussing ways to improve on dselect but, like Kent West, since this is
where this thread has been developing, I will have my say on it here as
well.
I now use dselect quite a bit and think it is wonderfully capable and
helpful and is probably one of the best things about debian, but it
wasn't always so. When I first tried to use it I was to the point of
accusing it of being a work of the devil. So, let me suggest what I
think are the biggest problems with it for the beginner.
I think the biggest problem may also be the simplest to remedy, and
that is that the help menu on keystrokes is too cryptic and isn't out
where you can see it when you need it the most. The very most
important keystrokes are buried down at the bottom, and probably have
not been memorized by the beginner before he begins, namely, X, Esc and
R. The beginner needs to be fully aware of these and the need to back
out if he gets in over his head, before he is committed beyond
redemption. A more verbose list of commands with some of the more
important ones a little more prominent would be very helpful to the
beginner and if it were possible to have the commands listed on the
screen at the same time as one is attempting to use the commands rather
than having to memorize them or write them down, that would be even
more helpful.
Another thing that would be very helpful (and perhaps it exists and I
just have not yet found it) would be an easy way to just back up to
where one was a moment before, but not all the way to the beginning.
So, say you see a package on the list that you think you might like to
install, and so you hit the + key. Then you find that it requires
about 300 other packages that you don't have installed, and some of
them conflict with others that you do have installed and are more
important to you than this new one that you just decided to try. What
you would like would be a sort of a back button or an undo that would
just back-step one step at a time. Now, as I said, maybe it already
exists, but if it does, a beginner certainly wouldn't easily find it by
looking at the keystroke help page. So then he is left with the choice
of either slogging ahead into potentially dangerous territory, or of
quitting and losing everything that he had done up till then and just
starting over. It would be very useful to be able to see just how
complicated a problem you are about to get yourself into before you
commit yourself and then to back out gracefully if that seems wiser
than going ahead.
Another thing that would be really nice would be a way to see
the packages listed in the same order more than just one time in a row.
By that I mean that, when you first update your list of available
packages, then go to the select menu, you will see a list of the
packages which have changed up near the top of the list. But if you go
to making some selections, and then make a mistake somewhere along the
line, or if you just quit after only doing half the job you would like
to do, and then restart dselect later, you will never see that same
list again. Those packages that were listed near the top once, will in
the future be integrated into the long long list of packages, some in
the list of packages that are installed and some in the list of
packages that are not installed. It would just be really nice to get a
second shot at that list that you saw the first time.
Now this has already gone far too long, and I don't know if this long
winded listing of beginner problems as I see them sounds familiar to
anyone else or if these are just my own peculiarities, but these are
the things that I found to be problems when I was new to Debian. In
fact, even though I use dselect often, now, I still don't really use
many of the keystroke commands it offers because of two things: a)
they aren't on the screen as a memory aid when I might be likely to
need them and so I just use the ones I can remember, and b) the help
screen is so cryptic that I still don't really understand, for sure,
what a given command will really do, and what I might want to use it
for. Now, perhaps, if I were to print out all the documentation, and
go through it thoroughly, and really understand everything about the
program comprehensively before I started, I might answer a lot of these
questions for myself, but I have not every done that, ?and I don't think
many other people do that either. The natural human tendency is to
barge in and then try to figure out what to do as one goes along. And
programs that are designed to be easy to use usually take this human
tendency into account and allow you to barge in and yet not get
flattened by problems that you couldn't have possibly foreseen. One of
the best things that makers of software installers for Windows and
Macintosh have done is to put in the back buttons that allow you to go
back through your choices before you actually commit yourself. I know
that something like this would be a really big project for a program
like dselect, but if Linux is to ever become an operating system that
large numbers are going to be able to cope with, some such thing will
need to happen. And I have not used any other modern version of Linux
other than Debian, all others that I have used were years ago and were
much more primitive, so I don't really know what else is out there
today and I'm not making any comparisons or saying anything is better
than anything else. But this question of whether dselect is easy of
hard to use seems to be debated over and over again on this list, and
there always seem to be some people saying "what could be easier" and
others saying it is hard for beginners, and then it all just dies
until the next poor unsuspecting beginner has the temerity to complain,
and then it gets rehashed all over again. It seems to me that a few
fairly simple amplifications of the help screens and perhaps a few
slight changes to the keystrokes could make a big difference in the
beginners first encounter. Some other changes which would make dselect
truly user friendly would be much more labor intensive and would
require some sort of a new user interface.
I doubt anyone is still reading at this point, but at any rate I've
shot my wad so there. I know that, Debian being an all volunteer
organization so to speak, if anything is going to get done it requires
vulunteers to do it, and so, if I have all these ideas I should be
putting them into action. Maybe a dselect HOWTO that could be referred
to as the program is used would be one option (or does one already
exist?). I wish I felt qualified to write one, but I would need to
learn how to really use the program rather than just bumble along with
it as I now do before I could really do anything useful. Also, I'd
have to find that other's share my view of the problem, otherwise I'd
just be writing it for myself. I may be trying to talk myself into
something I'm not really prepared for here so I'll have to think about
that a little longer before going any further with it.
Feedback positive and negative accepted and sorry for going on so long.
Donald MacDougall
dmacdoug@hsc.usc.edu
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