Re: 1.1 dselect stuff

[Bruce Perens]

 1) Deselect detected the new packages and attempted to upgrade 
 everything.  I actually thought this was kind of neat at first 
 until I realized how long 82MB of stuff takes to download over
 a 28.8 link.

There actually is a way to tell it to take no action, however that's
not the default.

 2) A bug in dpkg couldn't deal with zlib1's Version: 1:4-6 line.

Hand-install the latest dpkg, and then run dpkg --clear-available.

 3) Dselect deletes uninstalled files (ones that encountered 
 installation errors) when it asks you delete installed files?, 

I'm assuming this is the FTP installation method. It should not do
this unless you tell it to remove the directory. It may need an
upgrade too.

 4) Deselect downloads the files in a random order (a perl hash
 at work here no doubt:)  What it should do is a DFS on the dependency 
 tree so that if your download is incomplete most of the files you
 grabbed will still install.

We know. We've been working on dependency graph tools.

Thanks

Bruce
--
Bruce Perens K6BP   [EMAIL PROTECTED]   510-215-3502
Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for PGP public key.
PGP fingerprint = 88 6A 15 D0 65 D4 A3 A6  1F 89 6A 76 95 24 87 B3 


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

1.1 dselect stuff

[Brian S. Julin]

Greetings,

I went over to a friends house last night and fired up his seldom- 
used Debian Linux 1.1 partition to install gs and ghostview for him.  
I thought I'd give a list of quirks I noticed even though a lot 
of them are probably fixed.

1) Deselect detected the new packages and attempted to upgrade 
everything.  I actually thought this was kind of neat at first 
until I realized how long 82MB of stuff takes to download over
a 28.8 link.

2) A bug in dpkg couldn't deal with zlib1's Version: 1:4-6 line.
I suspect a perl regexp that should be (.*?):, not (.*): but anyway
that's probably been noticed  fixed in a more recent version of dpkg.  
I guess what I'd suggest here is that dselect should know enough to
upgrade dpkg first before trying anything else.  Also, this
bug crashed dpkg and dselect.  I didn't appreciate being kicked
out of dselect so abruptly; it should handle dpkg errors, though 
I was pleased that it didn't lose my changes to the package selection.

3) Dselect deletes uninstalled files (ones that encountered 
installation errors) when it asks you delete installed files?, 
so that wasted line time from my perspective.  Just because 
dselect polices your initial package selection, it shouldn't 
assume that the download completed and everything will be OK.  
Keep aborted/incomplete .deb files unless told to purge them.

4) Deselect downloads the files in a random order (a perl hash
at work here no doubt:)  What it should do is a DFS on the dependency 
tree so that if your download is incomplete most of the files you
grabbed will still install.  Perhaps it should also give priority
to packages in base/.

--
Brian S. Julin


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]