William S. Gribble wrote: > > Ian Jackson wrote: > > I'm not interested in hearing any more complaints or even extensive > > suggestions for improvement, unless the person complaining is > > volunteering to do the work on a new interface. > > If you don't want feedback about the tools, might I suggest that you > give up their maintenance to someone who does? Dselect as it exists > is nothing more or less than a working prototype of the tool it needs > to be.
I think you misunderstood Ian's statement. Once again, you are complaining (rather harshly, I might add) without volunteering to write code. Ian has a lot of responsibilities, and he performs them well. Like Raul, I think that you or others could help without taking over maintenance of the dpkg package. > I realize that it is too late for a rewrite of dselect before the > release of 1.1. However, let's just get it out in the open: as it > stands, dselect is a liability with respect to general acceptance of > debian. It is a nightmare to use, has an interface that only its > programmer could love, and gives the appearance that at every moment > you use it your entire system is in jeopardy. The subtext in Bruce's > recent public announcement about the relationship between Debian and > the FSF was that Debian is comparable to or better than Caldera/Red > Hat. New users are going to look at dselect and immediately decide > that Bruce must be smoking crack. Maybe I'm enjoying the same substances, but I like dselect. I won't argue that dselect _cannot_ be improved, but I happily use it at least once a week to maintain and upgrade my system. I use the dpkg-ftp method exclusively, and I love it. (The only thing that I can think of that would save me time would be a "New Packages" summary, but I'm doing just fine without it.) Aside: I'm probably flame-bait, but if I were to write a user interface in python/Tk, would anybody want it? I realize that perl is (debian) standard and Tcl/Tk is popular, but I am a python/Tk lover. :-) Well, I think I'll do it anyway because it'll make me happy, and then we can talk about the rest of you. ;-) -- Jeff Ebert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
