dselect and a Recent Experience
In the spirit of helpfulness on this list, I want to repay
some of the assistance I have gotten from others, here. This message
is a warning, not a gripe. I think Linux software is astoundingly
robust. Like anything, there are gotchas. I am not sure exactly what
happened, but I last week trashed my system at home while doing a
rather innocent upgrade based upon what dselect computed needed to be
done while installing a single package. I wasn't paying attention
closely enough because things usually work perfectly and what happened
was that a large number of packages got removed and the system ended
up not even being bootable. Fortunately, I do /home backups on a
daily basis and I was even able to use a rescue disk to tar /home so I
didn't loose data. The new version of my system now has ext3 file
systems for everything and grub as the boot loader. the only real loss
was time.
Today, here at work, I was going to install bittorrent on ta
Debian system and I used dselect to list the packages in order to find
bittorrent. It found it and I started to install from there except I
saw that dselect was also going to whack about the same number of
packages here that it did when I was on my system at home. Both are
very stable woody-installed systems. I was actually awake at the
switch this time so I aborted the tragedy before it happened. I used
apt-get install bittorrent since I knew I had it in the package lists
and it appears to have worked fine and corrected the dependencies
needed to install bittorrent.
dselect has, for the most part worked very well so I think
there is a possible bug somewhere to cause it to get confused as to
what it is supposed to delete, but everyone needs to pay closer than
usual attention to what dselect is doing if or when you use it.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
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