Alright now that I've had some time to sleep and think about the things I learned yesterday here's my feeback. (I know this is a little long, but please bear with me)
The two main problems that I see are: 1. The docs on the website are not very good at explaining how to use fink when you are using the cvs distribution version. 2. There is no one place for all command and control of fink. i.e. there is no one place I can go to get the whole picture of the status of a package that I'm looking for. I think #2 is the real crux of the problem, but it needs further explaining. I think the best way to do that is by looking at the problem I had yesterday. Before I explain the problem, let me explain how I use fink. (I know this is personal and will change from one person to the next, but I don't think I'm out of the norm on this): 1. If there is a binary package available in the fink infrastructure, then go with it. 2. If there is not a binary, but there is a stable source release, I may or may not go with it. Even if I do go with it, I might wait until later when I will have time to compile not only that package but any pre-reqs that it might have as well. 3. If it's not even in stable I most likely will not use it unless I'm really feeling adventurous or really want that program. Now, to to gather the necessary data to make these determinations seems to be problematic (at least it did yesterday) Here's what happened: I wanted to see if fink could give me a package that I was looking for, i.e. 'bitchx'. So the first thing I did was bring up a terminal and do a 'fink list' and looked for the package. Fink did infact list it. So the next step is to see if there is a binary available, which means dselect or apt-get. So I ran apt-get and it told me that there was no package available. So I made, what was at the time the next most logical step to me, which was go to the website and check the status of the package. As we saw yesterday, the status of the package as listed on the website, was unstable. I now realize that this was incorrect based on the version of the distribution I was using, but I hope you see how I came to that conclusion. I guess the proper conclusion should have been that since it was listed with 'fink list' AND since my fink distribution version is cvs AND since I'm not using the unstable tree THEN I should conclude that I can compile it from source and get a stable version. However, that is a lot to have to deduce on my own. On top of that I still have to use two different utilities (fink and dselect/apt-get) and I don't have visual confirmation of my deduction spit out from either of those commands (which is why I went to the website to verify my deduction, which is yet a third place to have to look at data). If there was just one command I could use to be able to gather this information in a consistent manner then I would not have the problem that I ran into yesterday. This was part of the reason that I requested the feature change to fink of being able to list packages on a binary vs non-binary-but-stable vs unstable fashion. And I still believe that this would be helpful. This is what I mean by "one place for all command and control of fink". I know this was long winded and your eyes probably glazed over a long time ago but this was the best way I could come up with to explain my problem. Do you understand the problem? -Rich
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