On 15.04.2010 17:22, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
Hi,
On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Zlatko Calusic wrote:
OTOH, if I'm reading the patch and description correctly, this
change will kill new package detection in dselect, which I believe
That was already killed since quite some time as you have noticed
(all non-installed packages were marked as new).
To be completely honest, I was very confused most of the time.
At first (that was probably 1.15.4) something horribly broke. I though,
I better revert until this get resolved. So, I was happy to see the next
version after that, only to learn that situation was not improved much.
I was confused that so many other bugs were fixed (which were mostly
unnoticeable from the user perspective), while "the big one" still remained.
Much later I learned that the problem existed because dselect couldn't
keep the state across runs, but I was still confused why haven't we just
reverted to the version that doesn't have that bug?
And only recently, after carefully reading many bug reports on the
topic, I understand that the whole problem arises because format of the
status file changed to make it smaller. Or something like that... I
still can't be sure I completely understand why is this breakage so
persistent. :)
And I also thought for a long time that the change that broke the
package in the first place would just be reverted until the proper fix
is ready. Half a year later I see that I was terribly wrong on that
expectation. :)
The current change only improves somewhat the situation.
is one of the main features why aging dselect has so many trusty
followers after all these years. For us that live with sid and like
to upgrade often, it's certainly a killer feature. No new package
enters the Debian repository, unless we check it out first and see
if it's worth installing or not. :)
Aptitude is also able to show new packages.
From the perspective of a long time dselect user, aptitude just seems
too different. Seeing that it is becoming the future, I tried to switch
to it multiple times. But on every such attempt I couldn't simulate all
the functionality that dselect provided me and I depended on regularly.
So I gave up eventually. Honestly, I don't even know what's wrong with
dselect that aptitude emerged as the new kid on the block.
Too bad dselect was written in C++, otherwise I'd have invested my
own time trying to fix this, long time ago. Unfortunately, I don't
grok C++, just plain C.
You can follow http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=551638 to
see the progress made on restoring the original feature by tracking the list
of seen packages somewhere else than in the dpkg status file.
Yes, I've bookmarked that page today and I'm absolutely interested that
dselect gets fixed as soon as possible.
Robert also provided a patch for this (so you have the possibily to run a
custom dselect with his patch if you want) but it's not yet clear what
approach we're going to follow for this.
God speed!
I understand there are probably many more popular and "sexier" packages
and projects to work on today, but don't forget that Debian has grown to
be what it is today on the shoulders of dpkg/dselect. And we're supposed
to take care of our elderly, right? :D :D
Regards,
--
Zlatko
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