Re: Comments please

["Orn E. Hansen" <oe.hansen@oehansen.pp.se>]

Þann 28-Jan-98 skrifar George Bonser:
> 
> What problem?  Red Hat is dependancies too.  It just does not let you know
> about them until you waste your time downloading a package and then try
> to install it and fails because you need something else.  So now you
> download and install it and THAT fails because you need to upgrade
> yet something else.  
> 
> The entire point of Debian's system is that you know at the start
> everything you need to do to get a certain package installed.  You see
> that as a weakness, I see that as a major benefit.
> 
  Within certain context, it is a weakness.  In the beginning, I used 'dselect'
a lot to select packages, only to discover that it had dependencies that were
bogus.  Some dependencies were to packages that didn't exist (such as elfx11r6
or something like that), and it took a lot of time away.  Even now, some of
these dependencies are buggy (mainly because the packages are out of date)...
like I tried to install wxwin, only to discover that wxwin-runtime pre-depended
on wxwin-ol-runtime | wxwin-motif-runtime, and wxwin-ol-runtime pre-depended on
wxwin-runtime... leaving wxwin-motif-runtime in the void, because it didn't
exist.

  I usually use dselect to view the packages available and then use a
combination of ncftp and dpkg to install them (This is why I went into the
process of designing an alternative GUI view to the package format).

  But, to be able to see the dependencies beforehand, is a benefit... as long
as you have an option to override it, if you think you know better than the
software does.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Orn Einar Hansen                         oe.hansen@oehansen.pp.se
                                          oehansen@daimi.aau.dk
                                        voice+fax; +46 035 217194
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