[reply address disguised for anti-spam purposes. Real humans are encouraged to contact me: my username is gobbel, my host is cogsci.ucsd.edu. Spammers go away--forever.]
My impression has always been that dselect was modeled on inst, which used to be the only way to install software on Silicon Graphics systems. If dselect wasn't at least inspired by inst, then it's a case of parallel evolution, because the user interface is very similar, and the SGI package management system appears to have many of the same features as dpkg. I always hated inst because of what I found to be a very non-intuitive user interface, and dreaded having to do system upgrades on SGI machine (well, I still do, but not because of the way their package management system works). Anyway, Irix releases from 5.0 and up now have a replacement for inst called the Software Manager, which runs on top of X, and which I find very easy to use. The usual way to do a major upgrade on an SGI is to use inst only for the most minimal installation, then to use the Software Manager for the rest. Anyone who has in mind to redesign dselect or create a successor to it would do well to find an SGI system somewhere, and at least get a tour of the Software Manager. A "staged" installation procedure, using a curses-based tool just to get X and the most essential stuff (e.g. a simple editor), followed by a nice X-based tool, makes a lot of sense. Perhaps in that case there wouldn't be any need for a major rework of dselect--though I do think that a "folding" feature would be a very nice addition. I would be quite happy to have a Tcl clone of the Software Manager for Debian, and I don't think it would be too hard to implement. [reply address disguised for anti-spam purposes. Real humans are encouraged to contact me: my username is gobbel, my host is cogsci.ucsd.edu. Spammers go away--forever.] -Randy -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]