Everything old is new again (and again, and ...) [LWN.net]

Everything old is new again (and again, and ...)

Posted Oct 11, 2003 13:52 UTC (Sat) by maney (subscriber, #12630)
Parent article: Synaptic: Point-n-Click Software Management (LinMagAuOrg)

Back when I first tried Debian in 1996 (or early '97, maybe), one of the things I liked about it was dselect. Oh, sure, cramming a multi-pane GUI into a text-mode interface left some rough edges, but you could scan or search the list of available packages, sort it various ways, make selections (see that they would drag in a kitchen sink you didn't want, or would force the uninstall of things you did want, and revert that choice), and... oh, well, yeah, it would wait until you said you were done making changes in the package selections to actually go and fetch them.

dselect, aptitude, synaptic... oh well, different looks for different markets, I guess.

(Log in to post comments)

Everything old is new again (and again, and ...)

Posted Oct 11, 2003 17:10 UTC (Sat) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

dselect has very unintuitive interface. Normally Enter acts on the currectly selected item, but in dselect it has a global meaning "Confirm, quit (check dependencies)".

aptitude is a bit better in that regard, but the influence of dslelect is still noticeable. I think it's for the same "market", but it still needs a lot of work.

synaptic depends on X, which makes it less useful for system recovery, but allows it to implement an interface better reflecting the concepts of package management.