On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 03:18:27PM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton scrawled: > i _did_ know of dselect and don't like it, it is _way_ too > confusing and terse: keystrokes are invisible and it is > impossible to find out what they are. Every time you start dselect and go to the select packages section, it tells you this. Every time. > is there a search option like apt-cache search? Use the '/' key. > "you seem to have problem A. > > several people including yourself have encountered problem A > before, and it is becoming boring and monotonous to hear > yet another report about people fixing A by trying Y. > > you do not know what you are doing if you have tried Y. > > if you knew what you were doing, you would do it like X." > > where there is a complete lack of comprehension and appreciation > for the simple fact that it is NOT POSSIBLE to obtain ANY > hints as to the relationship between A and X by trying to > do Y, and Y failing to resolve A. apt-cache show xserver-xfree86 | egrep ^Recommends: > in your paragraph above as an example, i DID NOT KNOW that > apt-get falls into category Y because i have been using it > ever since i started using debian, three maybe four years ago > and i DID NOT KNOW that aptitude even existed and falls into > category X to solve A. Well, apt-get isn't designed to be used by end-users, really. That's why dselect, aptitude, and the now-tanked deity exist(ed). These provide a nice, consistent interface, with proper handling of Recommends, et al. > my question to all of you, the knowledgeable and experienced > debian developers, is: > > can you appreciate that there must be something wrong, > here, if someone who has been using debian for years > gets into difficulties due to lack of information? As I'm not a Developer per se, I'll claim the 5th on this one. ;) > imagine then how difficult it must be for someone who is > new to debian, like my brother dan, to recover from quite > simple mistakes. He'd probably be using dselect, or aptitude. > (dan asked dselect to use gnome, then removed gnome, and > then needed to upgrade an independent package: for _some_ > as yet unidentified reason the error about dselect wanting > to use gnome caused dselect, and apt, to not be able to > proceed on the other removes-and-installs). You probably should be consistent with the tools you use to manage your packages. :) d -- Daniel Stone <dstone@trinity.unimelb.edu.au> Developer, Trinity College, University of Melbourne
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