In this discussion it may be helpful to summarize my view on dselect-dpkg:
- the underlying mechanism seems to be very good (I do agree with everybody)
- the user interface could be better
- as a coherent tutorial the documentation is pretty bad,
and the fact that nobody from the inner debian circle has written
something else has severely damaged the usability and reputation
of the debian distribution.
I think my opinion about the bad documentation is confirmed by
Jesse Jacobsen. He says he is experienced, and did a *careful* reading
of the dselect help. And then about the keys:
"X" looks similar to "R", but some experimentation is in order
to confirm that -- it may quit package selection altogether.
So he is not sure.
Jesse and some other respondents gave useful hints.
But it is not the kind of documentation i am looking for.
What I do need is a non-technical description of the
<apt-get dselect dpkg> mechanism, which makes me understand what
happens when I use all the options - in interaction.
Everything about the availability and status files; former state;
effect of keys; (absence of) difference between 'apt-get update' and
dselect update; effect of 'dpkg --set-selections' on the contents of
the status file, and a nice one:
'dpkg --forget-old-unavail' documented as 'Forget about uninstalled
unavailable packages'. Forget ?
Examples of how things can be done are some of the books from O'Reilly:
TCP/IP Networking by Craig Hunt, and Mastering Regular Expressions
by Jeffrey Friedl. I think I do understand these phenomena now.
I do not need a tutorial at the interface level ('type first this
and then hit ...), but a tuturial at the level of the mechanism,
the underlying logic.
About resetting dselect. If someone says 'I only want ...'
he usually does not understand what he wants. I am afraid that
that is exactly my case. I only want to go back till before that
dramatic dselect session in which it wanted to download half a
distribution (over a 28K8 modem). I should not have added
to sources.list this unstable ftp-line, and then ask for a new
enlightenment, which needed a new libc6, which made obsolete
half of my distribution. I only want dselect-dpkg to accept
my machine as-is now, so that I may go on.
But I talk too much about things nearly past.
In a few months we have apt complete.
egbert
--
Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
========================================================================
