using dselect (was: Re: debian installation help)
On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 07:00:31AM -0800, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 03:28:20AM -0600, lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> was heard to say:
> > It was yast on Suse after 6.2 that made me switch to Debian because
> > yast kept doing things I didn't want it to do, and it finally managed
> > to remove qmail which I had spend a lot of work on to install it and
> > get it to work by myself, without even asking me. Aptitude seems to be
> > the same.
>
> aptitude never removes anything without asking you. (or rather, if
> it does it's a bug)
The point is that aptitude left unclear how I'm supposed to use it to
install or remove the packages I want. It kept showing me lists of
packages which I wasn't sure what they are supposed to mean (the
lists, not the packages). Trying to select packages for installation
eventually changed the lists in an apparently arbitrary manner and
eventually seemed to install a large amount of packages I didn't want
to install, for unknown reasons, i. e. not because of dependencies (I
can't tell for sure, but that would have been way to many packages to
be installed because of deps). It didn't let me see what is actually
selected for installation. Trying to change a selection yielded
arbitrary changes in the list. Aptitude seemed to want to totally mess
up the installation because it didn't seem to know anything about what
had been installed with dselect. In short, it was awful and unusable.
Dselect is straightforward, it lets you select a package for
install|hold|purge|remove, shows you dependencies right away if
needed. Before doing anything, you will be shown what it is going to
do.
Why make it more difficult and confusing? Why shouldn't using dselect
be recommended?
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