Steve, it is not unreasonable to want dselect (or apt) to be configurable such that you can choose to have it not do anything that you do not explicitely request it to do.
I have maintained a partial mirror of debian for quite some time now and still would find it handy if dselect were to have a mode such as I believe that you are suggesting. Having said that however... It really does work pretty well 'as is' to satisfy that request. It was designed to 'maintain' the system in as simple a fashion as such a complex issue can be managed. Although I admit to now being in the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" mode myself (while hamm is in frozen), I do not personally subscribe to that philosophy. The 'pain' of delaying upgrading to repair bugs can be considerable and particularly in the case for Debian, a package upgrade rarely breaks itself or anything else. Even during 'hamm' development, my own experience was that it was very rare that an upgrade run would break anything (until hamm went into 'frozen'). To me, it does not make much sense for dselect to require (possibly) hundreds of operations to preform an upgrade of the system to current levels. Even if an option were designed in to allow a selection of the default behaviour (automagic upgrade or NO-automagic upgrade) AND a single key operation to reverse the default, I still would expect that the 'shipping' default would be to upgrade. Steve Lamb wrote: > > On 16 May 1998 00:22:29 -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > >Steve> Exactly. I have been giving constructive critism and in return > >Steve> I have been getting a flippant attitude of "It isn't that many > >Steve> ketstrokes." In fact, one person has said that if the > >Steve> situation were reverse he(?)'d find it unacceptable yet is > >Steve> asking that I find it acceptable that I must do what he would > >Steve> not if things were reversed. > > > That happens not to be the case. If the reverse were true: > > that all packages were held be default, and I had to do two > > ops to turn them t be upgraded. I would do it. If I had to release > > them one by one, that would be unacceptable. > > > For gods sake, read before you flame. > > I did. I asked you if the reverse were true, if you had to select what > you wanted to upgrade, would you find it unaccetable. You said you would. > > What part of my statement above does not conform to that? I can go back > and quote from the exact messages, if you like. It wasn't a flame, it was > fact. > > -- > Steve C. Lamb | Opinions expressed by me are not my > http://www.calweb.com/~morpheus | employer's. They hired me for my > ICQ: 5107343 | skills and labor, not my opinions! > ---------------------------------------+------------------------------------- > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- best, -bill [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] from a 1996 Micro$loth ad campaign: "The less you know about computers the more you want Micro$oft!" See! They do get some things right! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
