I doubt there are many fink users who *don't* sympathize with your plight.

But consider that the fix happened in very short order. Add to that the constant updates of a very, very long list of software packages. Consider, also, that you can get help directly from developers and package maintainers.

I have never interacted with a for-profit (let alone not-for-profit) company as responsive and active as the fink group. And I can't tell you how many times I've had to completely reinstall various incarnations of Windows....

Look on the bright side: you could be using some other system, and have a lot more problems than you did!

Best -

On Monday, Nov 24, 2003, at 07:01 US/Eastern, Alexander K. Hansen wrote:

Technically, the problem was restricted to dselect. It is fixed, according
to the news item on the Fink website (http://fink.sourceforge.net).


About the problem being known for a week:


1) The problem had to make itself known to the developers, which requires
user feedback. This took a little time.


2) A bug report was issued on November 4, after the full story was
known--it does harm rather than good to issue bug reports without having
full knowledge of i) the bug and ii) its workarounds.


Your item 2) is completely independent: sources that are under control of
the upstream sites (e.g. ftp.gnu.org) can and do get moved around by those
sites. Fink doesn't have an automatic way to detect when this happens, so
user feedback is once again required.


I do empathize with your frustration about having to reinstall your OS:
recently my /usr/bin directory went missing for no discernible reason, and I
had to completely reinstall the OS.


--
Alexander K. Hansen
Levitated Dipole Experiment
http://www.psfc.mit.edu/LDX


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Arno Dirks
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2003 3:26 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Fink-beginners] fink safe to use again


hi folks,

i had that rather annoying experience of getting my
users wiped (rather, it wiped my users and changed the
name of my data partition on my trustworh iMac) when
updating fink (in fact, only really updated rsync).
i had to reinstall everything, as following the directions
posted here had no permanent effect.
i have two questions now:
1) is it safe to reinstall fink; i am *very* disappointed
that this happened, it was a bug known for about a week,
so i don't see why it still happened.
2) (perhaps related to 1) when i tried to update-all
of fink (after selfupdate'ing) i had the problem in
downloading libtools-1.5.tar.gz, when ftp'ed by hand to
ftp.gnu.org, it turned out that they had taken away
the 1.5 version for a while. so why was that not changed
in the fink cvs list?!

i really enjoyed the fink project, it was very nice
with the upt-get and installing form source option, but
having to re-install my OS (thank goodness my data
was on a different partition) on a bug that appears to have
been known is not a pleasant experience.

cheerio,
arno.


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