I've learned my lesson...<sigh>

[Joey Hess]

Nick Moffitt wrote:
>         On the contrary.  I've never actually used dselect.  I saw
> Rick Moen's initial four-day install experience and was reminded of
> the story of Job.  I do all my Debian installs one package at a time
> with apt-get, and I have a feeling that you'd have to pry me away from
> this with a pretty large hook.

Well here's a hook. Mind you I haven't actually written it yet.

This is a library that is LD_PRELOAD'ed. It intercepts all calls to exec and
open. It compares the filenames against a list of all files provided by all
of debian. It links with libapt. When a nonexistent file that is part of
debian is opened or execed, it apt-get installs the appropriate package. [1]

So with this in place, you install debian, then proceed about your business
and get everything you ever refer to installed, automatically.

-- 
see shy jo

[1] Of course, this is the difficult bit, especially if the package to be
    install conflicts with another installed package or if multiple packages
    contain the file. Or if the package you install prompts for input. I am
    working on a solution to the latter now, not sure what to do yet about
    the former.