On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Peak Allan wrote:
> As a Debian newbie I have to say that the worst thing > about Debian was dselect. It seemed to be a confusing > morass. Once I got a workable system it was great, > and I was impressed by how easy it was to go from > slink to potato, but getting started was a bear. > Allan I would slightly concur with your assessment of dselect but only in the sense that it lists simply too many packages. I am not sure, but perhaps it is possible to present the various software types in a less verbose manner. Sort of like the slrn news reader where one could collapse dependency trees depending on the software. It would be nice to collapse certain dependency trees while maintaining others.. Aside: Is there a way to display the whole dependency graph of all know debian packages? dselect is a very powerful tool provided one repeatly goes into the help section and to read EVERY little message that comes up. I made an explicit point of NOT reading the manpages or intros just to see whether it is possible to use the tool and it turns out to be possible. I am, however, grateful for the apt interface to package management. The ONLINE install method is simply one of the sweetess setups I have ever seen. Simply put it is brilliant. Having used Slackware for many years I look forward to the adventure. If such a user is willing to suspend his/her anxiety and to forge ahead he will be amply rewarded not just by using dselect or apt but more importantly with becoming involved with the community of users behind linux. Geez I am getting poetic, better shutup. -walter tautz ps. I would like some constructive assessments of Debian versus Redhat, particular with respect to the initial install. Also comparisons between dpkg vs. rpm? Feel free to mail me privately so that the list is not cluttered by this topic and perhaps I will post a summary of responses I get. Anyone have any webpages on these topics?
