There has been some recent discussion as to upgrading dselect with more
"user friendly" features for first-time Linux users. However, before this
path is taken, I think that some of the inherent bugs in dselect should be
addressed beforehand.
For example:
1. For whatever reason in Debian release 1.1, dselect consistantly
skipped packages primarily in the non-free section on initial
install. You basically had to go with the default settings and go
back after installing _these_ packages before you could add new ones.
Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn't. At some point after
several attempts, dselect would catch its errs (for whatever reason)
and install the "previously selected" items. It may have been due to
some packages slipping through dselect's dependency checks and
causing errors on post-installation setups (e.g. LaTeX and INN
configs in the 1.2 release), I dunno. In 1.2, this is still
happening, except that there are some more packages showing up not
installed in the contrib and news sectioans as well (22 pkgs total).
Something else that seems curious in the dselect procedure is that
these packages show up under: dpkg --yet-to-unpack, but dselect
doesn't touch them. dpkg -O should manually install them, but how
many first-time users would know that "man dpkg" let alone dpkg
itself exists?
2. If dselect hits _any_ install errors after a first-time setup, it WILL
cycle through the entire package database "Skipping deselected pkg" or
"Version xx.xx-xx already installed, skipping." times the number of
errors that were encountered on the first pass (i.e. I had 3 errors on
post installation of some INN stuff and I sat there watching dselect
cycle through the entire package database 3 time skipping already
installed or deselected packages or hitting the same 3 errors).
3. All of this disappears when _all_ of the install errors have been
corrected. This again seems strange as the errors happen at various
points in the installation procedure. Most of the packages after
the errors _do_ get installed. It just appears to be a select few
that don't. I don't have the faintest clue as to how dselect/dpkg
maintain its internal database of packages marked for selection, but
they (it) sure doesn't appear to do pkg install inline with the
internal database.
Confused,
-J.
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