[LUNI] debian??

[Martin Maney]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 05:54:50PM -0500, Larry Garfield wrote:
> dselect is the old/ugly/impossible to use/evil/hideous pseudo-GUI 
> package manager.  Never use it.  Ever.

dselect is quirky, mostly because in a non-GUI interface with multiple
scrolling panes and no toolbar you will get "magic" key assignments. 
Aside from those built-in limitations, its main problme is that nothing
simple is going to deal well with a distro with many thousands of
separate packages.

> For pseudo-GUI, try aptitude.  It's still clunky, but vastly improved 
> over dselect.

Mostly I agree, and I've switched over to using aptitude everywhere. 
Sometimes its default handling of recommended or suggested packages
surprises me (dselect always showed you all of that stuff whenever
there were any to consider), but most of the time that's fine.  On the
whole it works better for me, though I do sometimes miss dselect's
weird and wonderful alternate sorting orders when I'm looking for
something whose name I can't recall.  This is another aspect of Just
Too Many Packages To Know, and it's a fundamental problem with Debian
these days.

> For true GUI, there are various package front ends available for KDE or 
> GNOME.  I've not used any recently, so I don't know if any are worth 
> anything.

Anything that requires X is a non-starter for at least half the
machines I adminster, and sub-optimal for all but the two that sit on
my desks.

-- 
Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity
of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity
of the loser is perfectly clear.  It is the nation's confidence
in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law.
 - Justice John Paul Stevens, from his dissenting opinion Dec 12, 2000