ncurses-base wouldn't install, because of a fairly knotty series of depends and conflicts with ncurses-term and ncurses-runtime, and I didn't know what, really, to do about it. I decided to see what dselect would do.
I got lost, couldn't restrict the activities of dselect to the business at hand, and its defaults are apparently incautious, intending to do the most at the expense of being careful. Don't send me instructions at this point; for now, I will not use dselect again. I don't want to hear about it. I received a reply to a question on the mailing list about dpkg that dpkg it for those who know what they are doing. Dselect alls the more. And what of us who want to learn? I have no idea why dselect decided to remove gcc, and several other packages, it just started marching down a long list. My system was at least 10MB lighter than when I started. It was nice in some ways, but at the cost of my being able to control it. And it didn't have a clue any more than I did what to do about ncurses*. Alan Davis
