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After potato install, why does 1st dselect install so much?



AFTER SEARCHING through about 18 months of debian-user archives and
not finding a related thread, here's a question that's been on my mind
looking for a high-level answer.

Just now I did a fresh install of potato (2.2r2) from CD and chose
these tasks:
[*] Dialup                  Dialup utilities
[*] Laptop                  A selection of tools for laptop users
[*] Newbie Help             New user documentation
[*] Python                  Python script development environment
[*] Python Bundle           Full distribution of Python
[*] Python Dev              Full Python development environment
[*] Python Web              Python web application development environm
[*] Sgml                    SGML and XML authoring and editing
[*] Sgml Dev                SGML and XML development environment

Everything seemed OK, judging from having installed slink/potato about
a dozen times before (sometimes just for practice).

After a reboot, I launched dselect and:
 - [S]elect
 - upon entering Select screen, pressed ENTER ("- All packages -")
 - [I]nstall

It said:
  ... 65 newly installed; 89.8MB will be used ...

I don't get it.  Why does dselect "want" to install so much, whereas
the operating-system install (from Rescue Disk boot to the "Have Fun!"
message) did not?  The main installation routine didn't install such
basic packages as ispell and finger, but somehow those two (and 63
others) were in dselect's "queue" of packages to be installed.

Running dselect a second time doesn't install or delete anything. Is
"flushing" dselect a normal part of installing Debian?

If so, is there a design reason why it's meant to be that way, or did
it evolve (in the negative sense of "evolve"), sort of like some
packages use "Debian Configuration" and others don't?

-- 
Rob Cymbala        2nd email:  rCymbala@yahoo.com
cymbaLa@Lafn.org   GnuPG/PGP:  www.Lafn.org/~cymbala/pubkey.html



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