Re: Recent dselect experience

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Dale Scheetz writes ("Recent dselect experience"):
...
> WRT dselect:
> 
> My primary objection to dselect's behaviors center around it's insistance 
> that, barring escessive force, it should try and install every file that 
> it can find with a .deb extension. I can deselect everything first and 
> things seem to go more the way I expect.

Just put everything on hold - go to the `all packages' line and press
shift-H.  Then take the things you want to upgrade off hold with
shift-G.

I know that this isn't ideal.

*Don't* deselect things just because you don't want to upgrade them -
dselect will want to remove things you deselect !

> Second, when declairing problems or errors, or at other times, the 
> version information on a particular package is not available. Error 
> messages contain text like: ...problems in version  of package... where 
> space was left for a version number but not available at error print 
> time. Having version information available on all packages.

If you could reproduce this bug in a particular case, or at least tell
me which message it was, I might have a chance of fixing it.

> Also, the packages file seems to have caused me problems from time to 
> time. I don't fully understand the purpose it serves for dselect but 
> there are several things that it doesn't do. Primarily, my experience is 
> that dselect doesn't pay any attention to the state of the system before 
> it tries anything. In cases where I installed the base packages by hand, 
> dselect failed to recognize that I had done so and made a terrible tangle 
> of an attempt to do it again. This poor integration with a current system 
> make upgrading uncertain at times. 

How do you mean `failed to recognise that I had done so' ?  dselect
shouldn't need to know this; if you've already got a more-or-less
current set of packages it is supposed to just upgrade those you
haven't got the most recent version of.  Attempting to reinstall
packages should never cause a `terrible tangle'.

Please, would you people TELL ME WHAT ERROR MESSAGES you're seeing !
I can't possible figure out what's going on here with all this vague
language like `terrible tangle' and `failed to recognise'.

> WRT dependencies:
> 
> Several times during installation trials, large portions of the 
> installation would be complete before a file, required by a dependency is 
> either not found, or fails during installation. I'm not sure what to do 
> about failures, but files not found should be detemined long before 
> anything gets installed.

I can't parse this, I'm afraid.

Ian.