On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 03:19:00PM +0200, Mart van de Wege wrote: > On Thu, 12 Jul 2001 02:08:58 +0200 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Joost Kooij) wrote: > > > Dselect has a "select" mode that lets you manage your package selections > > interactively. The advantage of this is that you retain full control > > over package selections. > <huge snip> > > Aye, there's the rub: IT DOESN'T! Sorry for shouting, but the way dselect > handles suggests and recommends is braindead, to say the least. > If I want to install some package and not the suggests that go with it, I > can forget about dselect, unless I use shift-q to override the package > selection, which frankly defeats the purpose of dselect in the first > place, doesn't it?
When I test this here on a sid system, this is what I can actually verify: When you mark for installation a package that has a suggests: some other packages, dselect drops you in a dependency resolution screen. The screen lists the newly marked package and all the suggested packages listed. Only the already marked package is marked for installation. When you simply press enter, nothing is changed about your selections and you are back in the main list. When instead you do want to add some of the suggested packages to your selections, mark them for installation and press enter. In the case of a recommends:, it is usually a recommends: and not a suggests: for a reason. When you add a package with recommends: to your selections, dselect will propose the implied markings of the recommended: packages. But you can still easily change and override it, just revert the markings manually, or with the 'D' key, then override the automatic dependency resolver with the 'Q' key. If you were never supposed to use these, they would not have been programmed and prominently documented in the online help that is available in the package selections management mode. > It's true that some packages don't quite work as expected until you've > installed *all* dependencies (Gnome comes to mind), so for these dselect > is good, but otherwise it installs way too much cruft on your system and > gives you no sane way of getting rid of it. Well, in fact it does. There is the list of installed packages, from which you can choose packages to uninstall. It's intuitive, not? Experiment a little with the package list sort options. Find new ways of looking at installed packages and available packages. By section, by status, by priority, or combinations thereof. Explore previously untought of operations on whole groups of packages (don't aim at foot). Cheers, Joost
