Lately I've been using console-apt for installations, but I tend to run dselect, just to see what packages are new. As such, everytime I ran it, a couple of package selections changed due to upgrades, depencencies, etc. I didn't care about it, as I don't use dselect anymore. I found it rather odd that many things were no longer on my system's menu system. That's when I studied how update-menu's generates the menu. I noticed it used dpkg --get-selections, which I ran myself, and noticed the hundreds of "deinstall" selections, and realised what the fault was.
I just went through dselect and selected everything that was installed, that fixed up my system. A couple of ways I could have avoided this: - Is there some other easy way to see what packages are new? I would prefer to not use dselect at all, but this is something I really like. I thought of making this a wishlist bug for console-apt, but I don't think it will "fit in" well with the current (simple/unbloated/fast) design of capt (I like capt being as fast as possible, for use on old computers, so maybe `list-new-packages` should be a seperate program). One needs a backup of the previous package lists to do this. I think dselect did this with /var/lib/dpkg/available[-old], does using only apt/capt update these files, or possibly not the -old one? - Maybe update-menus should rather look at what is currently installed, rather than what the selections for the next "install/remove" operation will be. It does seem to make more sense to me. - This is maybe the best/most useful solution at this point: some easy way to sync the selections with what is currently installed? i.e. "undo" all selections. How can one do this? I admit to not have researched this properly: I haven't checked mailing lists for previous discussions, and haven't checked the BTS, so I apologize if this has already been discussed. Thanks, Hugo van der Merwe
