dselect (was:Re: [Gllug] Debian Matching Machines)

[Ian Norton]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 11:28:42AM +0100, Benedikt Heinen wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Joel Bernstein wrote:
> >I think the "dselect sucks" FUD is partly a hangover from Debian <2.2
> >[potato] when it was a more painful, less helpful app to use, 
> 
> Well, I'm not quite sure I agree. I have been using Debian for about 8 
> years now - on various machines, not just one homebrew machine, but a few 
> company servers, colocation boxes, my own desktop machine, and a number of 
> laptops.
> 
> I think that Debian has been a great choice, but I still think that 
> dselect is an abomination to use - it has improved in a few ways, but I 
> still think that dselect is the Achilles' heel of Debian.

I have never shown dselect to most of the people that I have introduced to 
debian over the years. I find that aptitude is alot nicer to use, 

as said before, dselect seems to have very poor consistancy of conventions
(if indeed that is a phrase) when it comes to inputs. 

I still find that the debian installers mostly just require you to press enter
to get a functional machine in most desktop cases (even my previous laptop). 

why cant dselect take a leaf from the kernel menuconfig app, ie, just one
column for status but with more symbols,

maybe like so:-

 [=] = installed and up-to-date
 [ ] = not installed
 [+] = installed, update availible

 [x] = selected for install
 [*] = selected for upgrade
 [-] = selected for removal
  
stuff indirectly selected could also be done in inverse video or bold,

.. \end{2pworth}



-- 
Ian Norton-Badrul

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