Marshall Savage wrote: > > I have been following your thread & you have my > sympathy. I'm too ignorant to have any ideas or > suggestions. Your problems sound like mine except on a > bigger scale. The Debian people keep claiming that dpkg & > dselect are so great but in my experience they are at best > medium in practice. They admit that the interface is not > the best but that the basic workingness is very good. And > they do seem to be a good place to start from to write > something that does work well. And the > documentation! Enough said. >
Actually I think dselect is pretty good. It was just designed for when Gnu/Debian was much smaller and had much fewer applications. In my case it probably should not have assumed that I wanted to upgrade everything, but not doing that could create different kinds of problems It is very difficult to write an installation / administration interface that helps the beginner / novice run a stable system, but at the same time not take away the power and control that more advanced users want and need. And when you consider that ideally people are going to progress step by step from beginner to expert the difficulty of writing such a usable interface seems quite great. There are just some really fundamental problems when beginners are system administrators. Tom
