[plug] ComputerBank meeting Tues 24th 7:45pm

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, Christian wrote:
> In all seriousness, what is it exactly that people have problems with
> when installing Debian?  Is it dselect or something else?

Though I think I understand dselect as well as anyone, I regularly give
thanks to RMS, Linus, and whatever other $DEITYs might be listening that
Debian have gotten rid of it.

It's power made it an indispensable tool, but it's interface was
definitely icky. With the arrival of apt, all of the unpleasant stuff be
done behind the scenes, and the new interfaces that are under construction
are far simpler, yet even more powerful, while leveraging the apt back-end
to bring a final demise to dependency headaches.

What bugs people about Debian installs, as best I can tell, is no longer
dselect, but the number of (apparently tricky) questions each package asks
during the configuration process. Other distros don't do this, leading to
an easier install of the default configuration, but often without a simple
way to do the basic configuration of the package. Present thinking amongst
Debian developers is, I believe, to make packages work with default
setting after the "Install" step for hands-free install, but to still
offer (and in fact recommend) the "Configure" step to allow the same 
fine-tuning as is provided today.

I'm not a Debian developer, and not on their mailing lists, so I could be
wrong about this. I hope something at least similar happens, because for
new users at least, a default configuration, however general it must be, 
is better than any configuration they would come up with, particularly
having never even _used_ the package before. As it stands, I regularly do
not change a single configuration from the default, even on fairly sizable
installs.

-Greg