I am sure that is some ways this problem is the result of my own inexperience, or that it may in fact already be addressed in the successor to dselect. However, I feel I should mention it in any case. Using dselect I ftped in wanting to get an upgraded package list for potato. ( most of my system is stable) I prefer to at least look at the packages in dselect because it will inform me of any required dependences even if I don't actually install that way. The problem is this. When upgrading the package list dselect marks everything that was installed as install. For example if I have bc100.0001.deb installed and potato has a bc100.0002 available this new file is marked for installation. What this means is that dselect and the dpkg database thinks I want to upgrade hundreds of megs of packages. Dselect is assuming that since I installed the previous version I must want to upgrade to the new version. This is obviously not tru for all applications. It also completly undermines dselects abilty to inform me of package dependences.
My efforts to fix this problem have dug me deeper into the hole and now I will probably be forced to do a complete reinstall. I think it would me far better for deslect or the new package installation tool to mark the newer packages as 'upgradeable' rather than assuming I want to install hundreds of megs. Thanks you, Tom
