On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 12:43:11PM +0100, Egbert Bouwman wrote: > No day without questions or complaints about the debian package system. > > Yesterday it was Hugo van der Merwe. > A couple of more or less random selected lines from his message: > > ... some easy way to sync the selections with > > what is currently installed ... > > I admit to not have researched this properly ... > > Each new user has to do his own research, has to make many mistakes. > I think this is a ridiculous situation.
This is the best way to learn. > It seems to be a policy of the debian-in-group not to talk about > the mechanism behind the package system: files that are being > read or written are hardly mentioned in the user documentation. > Looks like they adhere to the data hiding principle. It's a vast conspiracy!!! (Hint: it's all open source so you can find out as much as is possible about it.) > What we need is a HOWTO-like document that explains everything > about the files in the background: which file is read or written > or updated in what way when you use any option or command. It's pretty much all in the man page. A HOWTO is not going to be much easier to read. For instance see the FILES section where it explains which files are read or written or updated. > For instance what happens when you do a 'dselect update' with the > apt access method. Or what happens or does not happen when you hit > any of the action keys while in a dselect dependency screen. > Not to mention all the dpkg options. > > Is there anybody who understands all (or most) of it and can write > a decent howto ? I rarely even use dpkg directly any more and never dselect. apt-get is just much easier to use. Here's my howto: Use apt. Cheers, Chris P.S.: I admit there are neat little tricks like dpkg --get-selections, dpkg -S, dpkg -s etc. But these are what the man page is for.
