[Gllug] Debian Matching Machines

[Nix]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Bruce Richardson yowled:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 09:15:46AM +0100, Tethys wrote:
>> Nix writes:
>> 
>> >I have it on good authority (he said his name was `Ian') that the
>> >dselect UI is intuitive and simple. (As long as your first name starts
>> >with the letter `I' and is three letters long, and your surname starts
>> >with `J' and ends in `n', at least.)
>> 
>> Well I pass on the three letters part, but you seem to have misspelled
>> by name. I too find dselect to be an easy tool to use. It's one of the
>> things I really liked about Debian.
> 
> I've been using Debian for a long time but the best I can say is that
> I'm used to dselect.  I think the level of unfriendliness that a person
> perceives in it may have a lot to do with how much they already know
> about the Debian package selection and architecture.

That wasn't my problem with it: my problem was that its keybindings were
insane and wildly inconsistent, and keys that are universally used to
mean `accept' or nothing meant `quit' inside dselect (e.g. SPACE). (This
may have improved recently: I've managed to avoid dselect for a year or
two now, thanks to aptitude.)


It is not an exaggeration to say that I've adapted to a completely new
drastically non-QWERTY keyboard layout in far less time than I've failed
to adapt to dselect. (Part of this is, of course, that I don't own a
keyboard splitter, so I had little choice: `adapt or die' is always a
powerful motivator.)

-- 
This is like system("/usr/funky/bin/perl -e 'exec sleep 1'");
   --- Peter da Silva
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