On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 10:27:02AM -0800, Erik Steffl wrote: > IMO it has one of the worst UI I've ever seen. it confused the hell > out of me when I was installing debian for the first time. that's from > the vi enthusiast:-) And vi was intuitive and easy the first time you used it? For that matter, was the UI of an automobile immediately intuitive? I won't claim that the dselect UI is wonderful, but I really don't think it's as bad as you claim. It's at least consistant with itself, which is something that many common user interfaces lack. My only complaint about the UI is (as was already mentioned) the inability to collapse package lists. That would be wonderful. > I've been using aptitude lately. I also like the X programs (there are > some gnome and kde ones) for browsing the installed packages, > unfortunately they seem to be quite unstable (crashes, some parts are > obviously not finished etc.). I checked out aptitude (or was it capt?) and didn't see anything nice about it that dselect hasn't been doing for years. Other than alternative interfaces, do any of the other dpkg/apt front ends offer real feature improvements? > generally, I find packages using debian.org (or get name elsewhere, > like this mailing list) and install them using apt-get install > packagename. As do I, for the most part, but even then there are times when dselect is helpful. For example, apt doesn't handle package recommendations at all, so apt-get install vim won't even mention the extremely useful vim-rt. dselect does. > apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade > Sure, but then you're never told about newly available packages, only about updated version of stuff you've already got. Anyway, I'm by no means bashing apt at all. I am just trying to defend dselect a bit. I don't think it deserves the bad reputation it's been given. noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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