I do not plan to pursue this RFH any longer. I now see why Scott lost interest. If someone reading this wants to develop dselect, he is invited to step right in. Partial rationale: In studying the dselect source, one of the things I did was to go over and use aptitude for a while. I had never really used aptitude before, so I wanted to see what made it different. Unfortunately for dselect development, what I discovered was that I prefer aptitude over dselect. There is an old question in Debian as to whether and when developers should compete against one another in attacking the same problem separately (witness Gnome and KDE, for instance). The right answer to this question depends in my view on the specific problem, projects and personalities involved. Sometimes it seems better to standardize on one project; sometimes it seems better to compete. It depends. In the specific case of Debian package management, my view in the matter has shifted somewhat since I first replied to this RFH. I now tend to feel that the Debian Project should standardize; that we should encourage Debian sysadmins to use aptitude, layered atop apt, layered atop dpkg. If dselect's interface is preferred, then let this be further layered *atop aptitude*. Dselect as an alternative to aptitude should probably be deprecated by us. If anyone should pursue this RFH further, my well wishes go with him. Good luck. Signing off. -- Thaddeus H. Black 508 Nellie's Cave Road Blacksburg, Virginia 24060, USA +1 540 961 0920, t@b-tk.org, thb@debian.org
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