Potato install - package suggestions?

[Chris Waters]

Jim Franklin <jfranklin@etworld.com> writes:

> As an alernative to poring over /var/state/apt/lists, what I do is
> use ONLY the first three sections of dselect ( ACCESS, UPDATE, and
> SELECT) and while in SELECT check through the nicely organized list
> for the crucial apps I need and write them down.  Hit enter to exit
> the SELECT section and arrow down to QUIT rather than go into
> install.

I'm not quite sure I understand the point of that.  The Select section
of dselect is the part that most people dislike and want to avoid.

If you use the apt method for access, dselect will call apt-get to do
the installing, so the result is pretty much the same as your method,
without the requirement to write down all those package names and type
them in again by hand.  It solves most of the ordering issues that
used to be such a problem in dselect.  

And apt-get from the command-line will ignore recommendations, which
is *not* what you want in most cases (one of my biggest gripes with
apt-get at present).  And if there are alternative packages that can
fulfill a dependency, apt-get will simply grab the first one, which
may not be what you want, rather than offering you a choice.

If you're installing potato, the new task-selection mechanism isn't
bad at all.  I set up a system recently with this (using the software
development task, or something like that), and it only installed a
couple of packages that I find completely worthless.  Potato's
installer seems much improved over earlier versions.  Rick may even
need to rewrite his HOW-TO before long.
-- 
Chris Waters   xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
      or    xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
http://www.dsp.net/xtifr     | this .signature file.