Hi all,

First of all, I'm not on the list, so you need to cc me, so that I can get
your replies.

Now, this has bothered me for a couple of.. dunno.. years? and it strikes me
that the behaviour is still like this...
When synaptic fails to download all files, I get a dialog telling me this.
Something like:
"Synaptic couldn't fetch all packages, do you want to continue anyway?" [yes
/ no]

Now, here I don't know what to press. Should I expect dpkg and all the
beauty surrounding it to "just work" when some packages are missing?
Well, generally no. I don't trust any package program on my system (let's
say I have had a couple of nightmare issues over the last decade). No
complaint, dpkg _is_ good. Generally. But it has an evil feature of
sometimes making me spend a night "fixing things" manually.
However, if it's just some silly package from an unsupported (non-debian)
source, who cares if it couldn't be fetched, I'll try later.
But how do I know that? How do I know what to press?

I press no because I hate package issues (I use debian sid, so, well things
break sometimes). Now _after_ I press "no", a dialog box tells me what
packages couldn't be fetched.
Please tell me, where's the logic in that? Wouldn't it be like _much_ more
reasonable to expect that information _before_ you force people to ask the
question? I use the word "force", because dialog boxes are always evil
(although sometimes necessary). So, when you force someone to answer a
dialog box question, _make sure_ the user is enlightened with all necessary
information to be able to rationally anwer the question. Don't spit that
critical information in their face afterwords, laughing silently. It's like
saying "watch out for the hole in the ground" after someone fell down in it.


Other than this abomination, synaptic is pretty great, so thanks for the
app,
Gustaf
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