Debian Bug report logs - #16022
dselect is impractical

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Martin.Gierich@stud.uni-karlsruhe.de (Martin Gierich)

To: submit@bugs.debian.org

Subject: dselect is impractical

Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 20:25:35 +0100 (CET)

Package: dpkg
Version: 1.4.0.19

dselect is hard to use, because:

1. It prefers archive snapshots and does not like updates. Since my computer
  is not connected to internet directly, I must carry updates on disk. To
  tell dselect/dpkg that there is a new file, I must carry the huge
  Packages.gz, too.

 When choosing "update" in dselect, it only looks at Packages.gz, and in
 some cases there are some files more, which are not recognized and some
 files are missing, which are not recognized, too.

 It would be much better, if you could specify ONE DIRECTORY (in "access")
 and dselect would search the whole thing for new files. This would not
 require to preserve the directory tree anymore, so the user could sort the
 files in a directory structure he likes (for example sorted by download
 dates). When choosing "select" in dselect, it would be much better, if each
 file (archive) has a flag, whether the file is available locally or must be
 downloaded first.

 Since carrying files on disk or CDROM often causes the name to be truncated,
 dselect should examine all files that are not found in Package.gz. By doing
 so, it gets their real names and description and it can update Packages.gz,
 so ideally there would be no need to download Packages.gz. When getting the
 file's real name, it can try to rename it, or if it is on CDROM, it can
 build a table that allows accessing it later.

2. Since this got lengthy, I continue later.

  /\/\            o o
 / __ \ artin      <
(_/  \_)         `---'

Message #10 received at 16022@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: jdassen@wi.leidenuniv.nl

To: 16022@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#16022: dselect is impractical

Date: Wed, 17 Dec 1997 09:32:30 +0100

On Tue, Dec 16, 1997 at 08:25:35PM +0100, Martin Gierich wrote:
> dselect is hard to use, because:
> 
> 1. It prefers archive snapshots and does not like updates. Since my computer
>   is not connected to internet directly, I must carry updates on disk. To
>   tell dselect/dpkg that there is a new file, I must carry the huge
>   Packages.gz, too.

No. You can also tell dpkg and dselect about "new" packages that aren't in
your old Packages.gz . Say you have some "new" packages that dselect doesn't
yet know about in the current directory. Then you can let it learn about
them by saying
	dpkg --record-avail *.deb
then you can run "dselect" and choose [S]elect etc.

>  It would be much better, if you could specify ONE DIRECTORY (in "access")
>  and dselect would search the whole thing for new files.

IIRC, the "dpkg-mountable" access gives dselect an update method that can do
this.

HTH,
Ray
-- 
PATRIOTISM  A great British writer once said that if he had to choose 
between betraying his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would
have the decency to betray his country.                                      
- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan 

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