On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 06:16:24AM -0800, Chris Waters wrote:
chris, thanks for responding.
i acknowledge and understand what you are saying about
aptitude.
if i had known that it existed, and had a command-line-only
interface, i would have investigated and possibly even used
it well before now.
i have been using debian for a number of years, now, and
i am puzzled that i have not come across aptitude before now.
(perhaps this is because i have been using debian before
aptitude existed? the man page is dated 9/8/00...?)
i _did_ know of dselect and don't like it, it is _way_ too
confusing and terse: keystrokes are invisible and it is
impossible to find out what they are.
pine at least has at the bottom of its display two lines
of context-sensitive options that allow you to see at a
glance what keys do what (ah ha! i note that aptitude does!
great!)
i always worry about pressing the wrong keys with dselect,
and have long since stopped using it.
i have now installed aptitude and will investigate it.
[hey it looks interesting, esp. the "Tasks" which has
a description portion at the bottom of the screen.
it still looks a little terse
and presents a frightening large list of packages at you.
is there a search option like apt-cache search?
]
> > surely this is painful, and because it is painful
> > this issue has not been fixed?
>
> It's only painful for those who refuse to use the tools that make it
> easy. If you insist on using apt-get, when you obviously *don't* know
> enough to use it properly, expect no sympathy from anyone. Apt-get
> requires that you check for recommendations manually. If you're not
> willing to do that, don't use apt-get. It's just that simple.
chris, i have to say this: this is amazing.
literally EVERY developer who has responded on this and
the other bug i raised last week has said something along
the lines of:
"you seem to have problem A.
several people including yourself have encountered problem A
before, and it is becoming boring and monotonous to hear
yet another report about people fixing A by trying Y.
you do not know what you are doing if you have tried Y.
if you knew what you were doing, you would do it like X."
where there is a complete lack of comprehension and appreciation
for the simple fact that it is NOT POSSIBLE to obtain ANY
hints as to the relationship between A and X by trying to
do Y, and Y failing to resolve A.
almost EVERY response i have received so far on bugs reported
fits into this template.
in your paragraph above as an example, i DID NOT KNOW that
apt-get falls into category Y because i have been using it
ever since i started using debian, three maybe four years ago
and i DID NOT KNOW that aptitude even existed and falls into
category X to solve A.
my question to all of you, the knowledgeable and experienced
debian developers, is:
can you appreciate that there must be something wrong,
here, if someone who has been using debian for years
gets into difficulties due to lack of information?
imagine then how difficult it must be for someone who is
new to debian, like my brother dan, to recover from quite
simple mistakes.
(dan asked dselect to use gnome, then removed gnome, and
then needed to upgrade an independent package: for _some_
as yet unidentified reason the error about dselect wanting
to use gnome caused dselect, and apt, to not be able to
proceed on the other removes-and-installs).
l.
p.s. i do hope that something positive comes out of all these
messages.
if i didn't care about debian, and didn't want other
people like my brother and my friends to be able to
use it (instead of bloody suse and stupid redhat),
i wouldn't press this issue, i would have dropped
it _several_ emails ago.
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