Joe Emenaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yes it does. You can hit "Q" to force dselect to accept things as you > have chosen.
Pressing "Q" causes dselect to momentarily forget about dependency conflicts. When installing the packages the user will certainly get lots of error messages related to unresolved dependencies. Furthermore packages which caused dependency problems are left unconfigured and the user can not configure them later using dselect. Furthermore, when using dselect in the future the user can not check for dependencies of other packages by pressing "Return" before leaving the selection mode of dselect since this will cause to pop up all the unresolved dependencies which he tried to override in the previous session, forcing him to override them now again in a lengthy process. In my opinion, pressing "Q" is not the way to go. > Also, as someone else mentioned, you can always use dpkg. Yes, dpkg allows to override dependencies. But the suggestion to use dpkg instead of dselect to handle hundreds of Debian packages is not worth to discuss. > dselect, aside from being a more 'friendly' front end to dpkg, seems to do > the following: > [...] > - half-heartedly attempt to enforce dependencies. The dependencies itself are "half-heartedly". The package maintainer thinks that ghostscript requires the ghostscript fonts, so he defines a "recommend" dependency between these two. But the user thinks the fonts are not needed since he only wants to view pictures, so he wants the dependency to be at most a "suggest". The basic problem is that package maintainers and users may disagree when it comes to defining dependencies between packages. And dselect doesn't provide a decent way to handle this situation. Regards, Johannes Plass -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]