On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 19:32:35 -0800, Brian Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 10:23:16PM -0500, Mason Loring Bliss wrote: > > Maybe I'm still waiting for my first real problem to show up, but I > > generally find dselect to be a real pleasure to use. > > > > Could you present an example of a problem you had with dselect? Honestly, > > I wouldn't be using Debian today if not for dselect, which I see as being > > a really nice selling point. > > If you really want to find out, go ask on debian-user. You'll find > plenty of people more than willing to piss all over dselect.
Hi, I'm mostly a user, and just lurking on the lists to get a feel for whether I want to become a developer or not, but on this topic I will observe that the dselect interface is very cumbersome and non-intuitive until you get used to it. Having "enter" exit the selection process (rather than simply selecting the entry) is perennially surprising, and if I ake the tragic mistake of hitting enter twice based on the muscle memory of some other application, I find I may have already taken actions I wasn't quite ready to take. Selecting packages, and their dependencies, can be confusing. In general, for safety and for confidence, I prefer to apt-get exactly the package and its dependencies that I have researched through the web interface. I have done something terrible to one system: which was a stable distribution. For a project, I needed to obtain a package versioned in the unstable distribution. I foolishly thought I could simply change the settings for dselect to grab that one package, but now dselect thinks it needs to change the package version of just about every package on my system, and I am reasonably sure letting it make that change will irreparably damage the system. So, until I deprecate that machine and rebuild it from scratch, I don't use debian tools on it at all any more. I presume there is a better way to grab a single package (and its dependencies) if one needs a different version than is available in "stable". I am sure there are other ways to damage a system using dselect, but my main gripes are interface: having to scroll or search through thousands of rather garbagy ackages to find what I want is just useless, the moreso if I don't know the exact package name. The web interface to finding packages is a zillion times better, and apt-get is simple and safe. (If I can apt-get a package versioned outside my overall distribution, that would be perfect.) -bluejack -- -:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-
