[Gllug] Debian Matching Machines

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 23:13 +0100, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 09:15:52PM +0100, John wrote:
> > As a new user of Debian, I never managed to work out how to drive
> > dselect.  I just tried it again now and I still can't fathom it.  Its UI
> > is arcane in the extreme.  Far, far easier to use apt-get and friends
> > than solve dselect.
> 
> One of the drawbacks of apt-get, compared to dselect, is that running
> plain 'apt-get update' doesn't automatically update the available
> packages list that dpkg consults when you run 'dpkg -p <package>' or
> 'dpkg -l <pattern>'.  You can do this yourself by running something like
> 
> 	apt-cache dumpavail > /tmp/available
> 	dpkg --update-avail /tmp/available
> 
> It would be nice if there were a way to set this behaviour to be
> automatic in apt.conf, but I haven't seen an obvious method of doing
> this.

As you probably know, but might be worth mentioning to others reading
this thread, anyone who eschews dselect for apt can achieve more or less
the same functionality as "dpkg -l" and "dpkg -p" with "apt-cache search
<pattern>" and "apt-cache show <package>". I always found dselect to be
one of the few parts of debian I dislike - for new users it's both
confusing and unnecessary.

Mike.

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