>>>>> "William" == "William S Gribble" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
William> Ian Jackson wrote:
>> I'm not interested in hearing any more complaints or even extensive
>> suggestions for improvement, unless the person complaining is
>> volunteering to do the work on a new interface.
William> If you don't want feedback about the tools, might I suggest that
you
William> give up their maintenance to someone who does? Dselect as it
exists
William> is nothing more or less than a working prototype of the tool it
needs
William> to be.
William> Dselect has come a very long way since the days of the perl dpkg,
and
William> the work you have done on it is valuable and admirable. However,
your
William> statement suggests that you regard dselect as being a finished
product
William> which needs only some debugging. I don't agree.
William> I realize that it is too late for a rewrite of dselect before the
William> release of 1.1. However, let's just get it out in the open: as it
William> stands, dselect is a liability with respect to general acceptance
of
William> debian. It is a nightmare to use, has an interface that only its
William> programmer could love, and gives the appearance that at every
moment
William> you use it your entire system is in jeopardy. The subtext in
Bruce's
William> recent public announcement about the relationship between Debian
and
William> the FSF was that Debian is comparable to or better than Caldera/Red
William> Hat. New users are going to look at dselect and immediately decide
William> that Bruce must be smoking crack.
FWIW:
I think that Ian has done a excellent job with dselect.
IMHO The real important feature of Debian is the packaging of
individual components and the dselect tool for using them
effectively. dselect may be a little complicated at first for newbie
users but is still an order of magnitude simpler than getting them
just add packages by had and expect oTt get something that works.
Unfortunately UNIX itself is complicated, if a newbie cannot master
dselect then they are unlikely to be able to get any benefit from
owning a UNIX system at all.
Personally I feel that dselect is basically in a good shape for the
1.1 release and is itself a significant plus point for Debian.
A new dselect2 might be worth doing but I suspect there are other
things that we could be more usefully doing to improve things for
1.2...
alvar
--
Alvar Bray
Meiko Limited Phone: +44 1454 855222 E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
650 Aztec West Fax: +44 1454 855223 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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