Re: new to debian have questions
On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 03:19:00PM +0200, Mart van de Wege wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jul 2001 02:08:58 +0200
> joost@topaz.mdcc.cx (Joost Kooij) wrote:
>
> > Dselect has a "select" mode that lets you manage your package selections
> > interactively. The advantage of this is that you retain full control
> > over package selections.
> <huge snip>
>
> Aye, there's the rub: IT DOESN'T! Sorry for shouting, but the way dselect
> handles suggests and recommends is braindead, to say the least.
> If I want to install some package and not the suggests that go with it, I
> can forget about dselect, unless I use shift-q to override the package
> selection, which frankly defeats the purpose of dselect in the first
> place, doesn't it?
When I test this here on a sid system, this is what I can actually verify:
When you mark for installation a package that has a suggests: some other
packages, dselect drops you in a dependency resolution screen. The screen
lists the newly marked package and all the suggested packages listed.
Only the already marked package is marked for installation. When you
simply press enter, nothing is changed about your selections and you
are back in the main list. When instead you do want to add some of the
suggested packages to your selections, mark them for installation and
press enter.
In the case of a recommends:, it is usually a recommends: and not
a suggests: for a reason. When you add a package with recommends:
to your selections, dselect will propose the implied markings of the
recommended: packages. But you can still easily change and override it,
just revert the markings manually, or with the 'D' key, then override
the automatic dependency resolver with the 'Q' key. If you were never
supposed to use these, they would not have been programmed and prominently
documented in the online help that is available in the package selections
management mode.
> It's true that some packages don't quite work as expected until you've
> installed *all* dependencies (Gnome comes to mind), so for these dselect
> is good, but otherwise it installs way too much cruft on your system and
> gives you no sane way of getting rid of it.
Well, in fact it does. There is the list of installed packages, from
which you can choose packages to uninstall. It's intuitive, not?
Experiment a little with the package list sort options. Find new ways
of looking at installed packages and available packages. By section,
by status, by priority, or combinations thereof. Explore previously
untought of operations on whole groups of packages (don't aim at foot).
Cheers,
Joost
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