XF86ConfigDrivers 3915

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:26:22 +0000, Grant Edwards

Very true. I would go so far as to say that dselect shouldn't be included in the distro as it stood when I last used it - towards the beginning of this year. It messed up my dependencies really badly to the point that when I would attempt to install things with apt-get I would get prompted to uninstall a whole lot of unrelated stuff. Getting into the nuts 'n bolts and working out what was wrong and why was too much effort - the whole point of a package management is to remove the need for that. And the user interface of resolving dependencies and conflicts in dselect is not particularly friendly. All these things could no doubt be fixed and submitting fixes is better than complaining etc etc...

Debian's package management is great apart from that though - apt-get and dpkg work really well and upgrading the whole system is not that much different than with Gentoo, which I'm currently using. The only area in which Gentoo's package management is a little lacking compared to Debian's is that when you attempt to uninstall a package it won't tell you of installed packages that depend on it - you have to perform that check manually yourself. Not a big deal, but a potential trap.