Uh, yeah... great. Ok, so we have a regression that is "OK", because it is based on whether a behaviour is technically correct. I've seen this bug for months and months, but thought it was a well known bug that just wasn't resolved.
In fact, I didn't even look for bug reports. I didn't even look on forums when I first found out about the bug from a user perspective. I just figure dpkg was *broken*, and of course someone would fix this crazy bug! How could it be missed? There must already be a bug report on this, I thought! You would not believe my level of astonishment, and the astonishment of every single Debian admin I've discussed this with, when they were informed that this non-documented, year old, planned and implemented serious change of behaviour was intended?! Meanwhile, sysadmins all over the planet, most likely hundreds of thousands of them, have been using this prior behaviour for more than a decade. The man page does not document it. The suggestions to resolve it in: https://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2012/03/msg00067.html by Guillem require that I install dselect, perform operations on it, then install dctrl-tools, and perform more obtuse operations via those tools. Tools that I will have to install on virtually every system, when I did not require them before. A wonderful, elegant solution to system upgrades, that made me very happy in bootstrapping at least 5000+ debian systems by hand over 10+ years, has now become very annoying. No docs anywhere about it. No mention anywhere. No man page updates. Nothing I noticed in any guides. No forethought to the consequences, except "Well, this isn't technically correct, so screw everyone!" What is it about Debian, that has people running around with sticks up their asses? Debian recently announced at how *PROUD* it was that one can actually play multimedia files now, without having to go to untrusted sources. Instead, let's replace that with the obfuscation of the entire reinstall / bootstrapping of new systems, under the justification that "It should be this way". It's like watching people that live in a bubble, or watching a rich person wonder why the poor simply don't just work. Or why they are hungry... why don't the poor just buy some food? This one single bug is going to cause a relentless flood of forum posts, of users hitting debian's servers, of mailing list posts, of queries in IRC channels.... the list goes on. Well, OK, so clearly stubbornness and the need ensure that things are Right, even if they break workflow for the entire universe is going to win out. So, if this behaviour is locked in, fine. Then would it be possible to get a warning in dpkg when --set-selections is used? Or, how about we remove that command all together, and replace it with another command? Or, add the functionality to apt directly? Is there any way around this silliness? I can count the number of people that have used dselect for anything on one hand, apt is what the majority of people use... So, can we at least get apt fixed? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
