Re: Debian Package HOWTO. Who ?
On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 12:39:54PM +, Colin Watson wrote: > > I can probably dredge up quite a lot from my sent-mail folder, with > things that I've answered frequently. Not sure when I'll have time to > write it up well. A lot of people obviously don't read the FAQs that are > already in existence, so it's a bit discouraging ... > > Can we have a bit less FUD about people having a policy not to talk > about how things work, or about "data hiding", or whatever, please? I'm > sure it's infuriating to the people who've put in all the work to write > all the good (and largely unread) documentation out there. > As a provocation it served its purpose. However I admit that I was unfair. But I stil think that my question for a more in-depth HOWTO is a valid one. I have reread the man pages of dselect, dpkg and apt-get, plus the relevant parts of the FAQ. They offer a lot of information, but of a rather superficial kind. 'In order to ... , type ...'. For many of the options described, you do not see what information is being used, and how it changes your system. In his many replies to cries for help Colin has given ample proof that this kind of information is badly needed. It is illustrated as well by the many 'I suppose ...' etc which you can often read in the explanations given by intermediate gurus. Some people suggest that I should read the developer's or packaging manuals or even the source. But I am not a developer, and i have never succeeded in reaing more than ten lines of someone else's C code if it goes beyond the 'hello world' level. My aspiration level is to be an intelligent end-user, but still to use more of the possibilities than only 'apt-get install ...', without the permanent fear of creating chaos. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Debian Package HOWTO. Who ?
No day without questions or complaints about the debian package system. Yesterday it was Hugo van der Merwe. A couple of more or less random selected lines from his message: > ... some easy way to sync the selections with > what is currently installed ... > I admit to not have researched this properly ... Each new user has to do his own research, has to make many mistakes. I think this is a ridiculous situation. It seems to be a policy of the debian-in-group not to talk about the mechanism behind the package system: files that are being read or written are hardly mentioned in the user documentation. Looks like they adhere to the data hiding principle. What we need is a HOWTO-like document that explains everything about the files in the background: which file is read or written or updated in what way when you use any option or command. For instance what happens when you do a 'dselect update' with the apt access method. Or what happens or does not happen when you hit any of the action keys while in a dselect dependency screen. Not to mention all the dpkg options. Is there anybody who understands all (or most) of it and can write a decent howto ? egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
apt-get flexibility
Is it posible to organize apt-get and sources.list in such a way that I can see - and select from - what is available both on my potato cdroms and the woody ftp sites ? Most of the time I am quite happy with what the cd's offer, but sometimes I will prefer a newer version, I suppose. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Re: Virtual screen switcher
On Fri, Oct 06, 2000 at 08:27:01PM +, Geordie Birch wrote: > chvt > It works. After sending my question I opened one of my eyes and discovered that there is a package 'screen' with the program 'screen'. It offers some more possibilities and complexities. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Virtual screen switcher
Hello, There seems to exist a program 'screen' with which you can go to another virtual screen. Makes obsolete, more or less. I can not locate it. Is it in potato ? Somewhere else ? egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Re: mutt macro syntax
This is the mutt macro i tried unsuccesfully: macro pager - delete-thread exit On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 11:58:03AM +0200, Vee-Eye wrote: > delete-thread is already bound to ^D (Ctrl-d) > and works fine. My object is to minimise finger movements, so i try to do most of the reading and deleting with the keypad-minus and keypad-plus, and the enter-key below them, all of them at the utmost right of the keyboard. Much better than ^d and ^q. My complete set of bindings is: bind index + display-message bind pager + next-page bind index - delete-thread bind pager - delete-thread When I use the last one, it is still necessary to use ^q as well in order to return to the index. That is why I tried the macro. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
mutt macro syntax
Hello, In my Muttrc i have the line: bind pager - delete-thread Now i can delete the whole thread of the message i am reading, but i still stay in the message. I want to return to the index-page. I tried: macro pager - delete-thread exit but that doesn't work. Does somebody know the right syntax ? The manual is not particularly helpful. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
potato-update and symbolic links in /etc
During my slink-life I have developped the habit to make symbolic links of all those configuration files in /etc and its subdirectories that I have changed myself. The real files are in /local/etc . This system has advantages and drawbacks. The big question now is what happens to this structure when during the update to potato some of these symlinked configuration files have to be updated as well ? egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Re: Package Info
On Sat, Apr 22, 2000 at 09:36:35PM -0700, kmself@ix.netcom.com wrote: > You can read the packages status file for information from > /var/lib/dpkg/status. This lists, IIRC, all packages available from > your various apt sources, whether installed or not, and is somewhat more > flexible than looking for the same information from dselect. > My impression is that the status file only contains info about packages I ever expressed some interest in. My status file mentions 709 packages, but the available file 2694. All 'Status: ' lines with 'not-installed' in the status-file say something like: install OK not-installed purge OK not-installed holdOK not-installed but never something like: unknown not-installed egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Status of .Xdefaults and app-defaults
When, in X, are the resources files ~/.Xdefaults and those in /usr/X11R6lib/X11/app-defaults used, and when are they not used ? >From the O'Reilly book 'X User Tools',page 385/6 I understand: if you use xrdb, no application will look anymore in .Xdefaults . I don't think this is the whole truth. Several scenarios are possible: - their role is fixed by the source or some compiled-in option: * they always set the defaults * they only set the defaults if they are not explicitly overridden by the load option of xrdb * they are never used if you xrdb, even if you only use its merge option - their role is completely defined by the use of xrdb: if you don't mention them to xrdb, they are completely ignored. I suppose the answers to these question are not the same for .Xdefaults and app-defaults/* egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Re: [Missing modules in python]What about TKinter
On Thu, Mar 20, 2036 at 11:31:14PM -0800, Steve Winston wrote: > Nor does my slink have TKinter. Why, o why? > We , or at least I, should read our "Python for dummies". Glob, fnmatch eo rside in python-misc, and it was not installed. I believe Tkinter is another .deb egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Missing modules in python
The import of glob, fnmatch and shutil gives an ImportError in Python 1.5.1, slink. Who has left them out, and why ? egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Re: pronunciation of daemon
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 09:09:07AM -, Patrick Kirk wrote: > accent. Finns say it one way; English speakers another; both are equally > valid as would any other accent. An old anecdote deserves to be retold in this context. Niklaus Wirth, swiss and inventor of Pascal, on being asked how to pronounce his name, said something like this: pronounced by name is like english 'weird', but pronounced by value it is english 'worth'. Afterthought: only programmers understand this. However there is more. I don't mind my heavy dutch accent. But all the same I try to pronounce my english in a way that the natives (1) understand me (2) don't laugh at me (3) are not distracted from what i say by my pronunciation. It is not always easy, because there are large discrepancies between the spelling and pronunciation of english, as yoy may have discovered yourself. When speaking english I try to find the greatest common divisor. The opinion 'everybody has his accent, so do what you like' is not very helpful in this respect. I think (but who am I) that the following pronunciations have the oldest rights and the largest number of followers: the i in linux not as in 'mind' but as in 'bitter' the ae in daemon not as ea in 'easy' but as the a in 'hate'. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Loonies
My wife says the proper pronunciation of linux is loonix egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Re: pronunciation of daemon, GNOME and GNU
On Thu, Jan 27, 2000 at 12:06:56PM +, Colin Watson wrote: > > The English word gnome has the gn as the first part of knee; in the case > of GNOME I pronounce a hard 'g' separated from the 'n', so guh-NOHM (not > proper phonetic alphabet, but it should suffice ...), by analogy with > GNU. > Thanks for your other explanations, but I think GNU introduces a further difficulty. I always thought that GNU should be pronounced as the wildebeest, just as the lion did after he ate a whole herd of gnus: It's twenty minutes past six. This is the end of the news. To my ears that pronuciation makes sense in the pun 'GNU is not UNIX'. However you seem to suggest that, by analogy with GNOME, GNU should be pronounced approximately as guh-new, or maybe as rhyming with canoe, giving guh-noe. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Re: pronunciation of daemon
On Thu, Jan 27, 2000 at 01:32:33AM -0500, Simon Law wrote: > For reference... > The New Oxford Dictionary of English says... > daemon (2) /di'[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ (also demon) > I don't have this dictionary, and I don't know the meaning of these pronunciation symbols. Remember the non-natives. In dutch the natural pronunciation of ... i is as in pin or deep, a is as in father, e is as in bed or bad (nearly the same sound to us), or hate, all depending on their environment. So tell me: the e in demon as in hate, deep or lemon, the ae in daemon as in hate, deep or lemon, the e in debian as in bed, hate, or deep, the gn in gnome as the first part of knee, genius or gentle, the i in variable as in like or pink, the g in integer as in get or gipsy, the i in inetd as in like or pink, the i in init.d (the first one) as in like or pink. Actually my list is much longer, but this is not bed for a start. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
ncurses and python
>From the slink cd i installed the python module python-curses 1.5.1-7 >From www.python.org/doc/howto/curses/curses.html (by Andrew Kuchling) I understand that this is the original curses module, and that there exists a much improved one, to be found at andrich.net/python/selfmade.html#ncursesmodule But that file, and all the other ones there, is rpm not deb. I cannot find anything like it in unstable main contrib non-free. So there seems not to be a new curses for debian. Is that true ? Also, in The Python Library Reference (www.python.org/doc/lib) I cannot find the function newpad(), mentioned buy Andrew Kuchlin. Nothing about colors either. So I really think this is the old curses module. What is my mistake ? How do I go on ? egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Re: Bad points for debian (was: resetting dpkg)
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
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
Bad points for debian (was: resetting dpkg)
On Wed, Dec 22, 1999 at 10:43:05PM +0100, steve doerr wrote: > Is there a way to change dpkg package remove tags? I ran dselect after > manually dpkg'ing postgresql and jdk and I somehow got almost everything > You are one of many, myself included, who asked similar questions about resetting dselect or dpkg after they created chaos. We only want to start all over again with the selection process. I have never read a helpful reply. Does nobody know ? Or did we ask the wrong question ? In the dselect man page (dd 29th november 1995) in slink you can read: The dselect package selection interface is confusing or even alarming to the new user. The debian group tries to remedy this by developing a new package, apt etc, which is not yet finished. For years on end we have to work now with the old interface. But I have never seen a clear, readable, understandable etc story about the use of these packages. Yes, in many texts you see something like: experiment, read the help pages, use the ... keys (they are your friend). In the meantime numerous people, often very sophisticated linux users, have been frustrated by dselect-dpkg. Many turned to another distibution exactly for this reason. The sad point is that this program-set seems to be better than anything else (rpm included), but that debian makes it virtually impossible for a large number of users to verify this hypothesis. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Vincent and the Potato CD
Several times last week Brian Servis had an opportunity to show us the way to www.debian.org/~vincent for some x11 upates within slink. Thanks, Brian. However, the Megabytes involved are more than I would like my telephone to listen to. Another option are the potato CDs. According to the latest mail there are more people looking for them. Found on amazon from seller [EMAIL PROTECTED]: a debian 2.2 potato pre-release on 4 binary cd's for $39.95 It is not cheap, but is it reasonable nevertheless ? And more important, can I expect problems afterwards, or should the introduction of these cd's into my sources.list, followed later on by the cd's of a stable release, work well ? egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
Supported video chip-sets
Hello, I am going to buy a new computer, but which video adapter/chip-set ? Many powerful new computers come with things like Matrox G400 or NVidia Riva TNT2. I am still using Slink with XFree 3.3.2, where these chips are not supported. However they are supported in potatoe with XFree86 3.3.5. Does this mean that I _have _ to upgrade in order to use them, or can i use them in Slink without their extra functionality ? For upgrading I prefer to wait for a stable potatoe, or at least for potato-cdroms. There are some completely new chip-set brands in 3.3.5, such as 3dfx with Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo3, 3DLabs with GLINT and Permedia chips. I don't even dare to ask. And some Diamond cards come with a 'Savage 4', which I cannot find in any XFree86 documentation. What is it ? egbert Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
dselect apt-get dpkg explanations
Does anybody know about a really good explanation of the combined use of dselect, apt-get and dpkg, especially after you have made a mess of everything ? The documentation I found in the slink distribution is either introductory or incomplete or referring to each other or to non-existent man pages. egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
How to reset dselect to zero selections
I made a mesh of dselect -> apt-get -> dpkg: i use slink with dselect access-method apt, in sources.list an ftp-source for unstable (potato) packages. The new enlightenment needed a new libc6, and the new libc6 causes the renewal of practically half my distribution, which i don't like to do over a telephone-line. So i decided not to download. But now i can't get back a clean dselect selection list: even if i think i have set everything on hold (=), there are packages back on select (*). It seems i have pushed on Enter at least once to often. Also i have tried a --get-selections / --set-selections cycle, changing the 'install' to 'hold' in between. My two questions are: - how do i bring back dselect to a healthy state - where can i find a clear, not cryptic, discussion of dselect, especially the interaction of the + - = keys, and the X Q D R and U keys (and the role of the Old Mark). egbert -- Egbert Bouwman - Keizersgracht 197 II - 1016 DS Amsterdam - 020 6257991
