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Subject: Re: [gentoo-user]  Re: Considering launching into Gentoo
References: <4A33A362.7070907@gmail.com> <200906131731.31867.alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> <h1134b$poa$1@ger.gmane.org> <4A341B0B.7010303@gmail.com> <h11er4$jh3$1@ger.gmane.org>
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walt ha scritto:

> Heh.  I laughed out loud when I read this link about dselect, especially
> the quote from Andrew Morton who captured my sentiments exactly:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dselect

Oh well but it's kinda obvious that dselect is HELL and no one uses it
anymore I think. I thought you were using something like aptitude, which
is a bit clumsy but works well.

But for me synaptics is THE way to do a user-friendly software installer.

> Yes, if gentoo ever disappears (God forbid) I would probably go back to
> Ubuntu because the Synaptics front end isn't too confusing.  But I'm
> still annoyed by the idea that a binary package can be only 'partially
> installed', whatever that means.  And why does a binary package need to
> be "configured", whatever that means?

Good questions. As for the first, I guess it means apt-get finds a
conflict or something wrong happens during installing (Tried to google
but didn't find anything). As for the configuring, well, I guess it's
something like writing default configuration files, or when you have to
do dispatch-conf here.


> After I dropped dselect like a hot potato I used apt-get from the command
> line routinely.  I recall that there were often conflicts between the newly
> downloaded packages and the old installed ones, leaving the machine in an
> undefined state for me to sort out however I could.

Yes this is bad, but probably is more due to bad packaging than to the
packaging system itself (On Gentoo you have other troubles like having
to revdep-rebuild your system etc., so to each its own)

> Perhaps Debian has matured a bit since then -- I certainly hope so!

I can say that using Kubuntu at work was mostly a piece of cake. It is a
different system from Gentoo with different goals, of course.

m.