The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

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Re: Recent dselect experience



On Sun, 21 Apr 1996, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:

> In message <m0u9jl4-000Bj2C@elo.ods.com>, David Engel writes:
> > 1. Make the info window smaller and optionally remove it completely.
> > I prefer to see the status of more packages at the same time.
>
> I agree---make the "short description" display somewhere unobtrusive
> (first or final line), and stick the rest of the infomation "behind" a
> hotkey.

Ack!  No!

This would just make dselect clumsy to use.

For me, one of the best things about dselect is that i can scroll down the
list of packages and get the full details on whatever package the cursor
is highlighting, especially when it's set to display the full dpkg -I
data instead of just the descriptive text...I like to be able to *see*
what a package depends on or conflicts with etc before deciding whether
to select it or not.

Changing dselect so that the info came up in a separate window would be
a hassle - move cursor, press "F1" or whatever for info window, press
"Esc" or whatever to get back to main screen, move cursor etc.

Why introduce another mode?  dselect is far from perfect in the way it
displays information, but at least it doesn't make thing unnecessarily
difficult by hiding vital information away behind yet another sequence of
keystrokes.

This is actually one of my pet hates...just because it's possible to
put something in a separate window doesn't mean that you SHOULD.  Too
many programs over-use windowing just because the feature is available,
rather than because it makes any sens in laying out the information for
display.

If you need to display more packages at a time, then try a larger xterm or
use "resizecons -lines 50" or something.

I suppose a good compromise solution is to allow the user to resize the
info window.  Or toggle it on/off.


> > 2. Allow TAB and shift-TAB to toggle between the status and info
> > windows.  That is more natural to me than using separate directional
> > keys to scroll the info window.
>
> This would be superfluous is you just used 'F1' (or something) to
> bring up the status window---it would have focus by virtue of your
> having requested it, so it would just eat keystrokes untill dismissed.

I like the TAB/SHIFT-TAB idea. sounds good, especially if the user also
has the option to resize the info window.


> > 4. Make the default sorting order be by section instead of by
> > priority.  Looking at things by section is much more natural to me.
>
> Maybe sort by priority within section?

yep, good idea.

Craig