Chapter 7. The Debian package management tools

39

  guide the user as he/she chooses among packages to install or remove, ensuring that no

packages are installed that conflict with one another, and that all packages required to

make each package work properly are installed;

  warn the user about inconsistencies or incompatibilities in their selections;

  determine the order in which the packages must be installed;

  automatically perform the installation or removal; and

  guide the user through whatever configuration process are required for each package.

dselect

begins by presenting the user with a menu of 7 items, each of which is a specific

action. The user can select one of the actions by using the arrow keys to move the highlighter

bar, then pressing the  key to select the highlighted action.

What the user sees next depends on the action he selected. If he selects any option but

Access

or

Select

, then

dselect

will simply proceed to execute the specified action: e.g., if the user

selected the action

Remove

, then dselect would proceed to remove all of the files selected for

removal when the user last chose the

Select

action.

Both the

Access

menu item and the

Select

menu item lead to additional menus. In both

cases, the menus are presented as split screens; the top screen gives a scrollable list of choices,

while the bottom screen gives a brief explanation ( info ) for each choice.

Extensive on line help is available, use the '?' key to get to a help screen at any time.

The order in which the actions are presented in the first

dselect

menu represents the order in

which a user would normally choose

dselect

to install packages. However, a user can pick

any of the main menu choices as often as needed (including not at all, depending on what one

wants to do).

  Begin by choosing an Access Method. This is the method by which the user plans on ac 

cessing Debian packages; e.g., some users have Debian packages available on CD ROM,

while others plan to fetch them using anonymous FTP. The selected  Access Method  is

stored after

dselect

exits, so if it does not change, then this option need not be invoked

again.

  Then Update the list of available packages. To do this,

dselect

reads the file  Pack 

ages.gz  which should be included in the top level of the directory where the Debian

packages to be installed are stored. (But if it is not there,

dselect

will offer to make it

for you.)

  Select specific packages for installation on his system. After choosing this menu item,

the user is first presented with a full screen of help (unless the ` expert' command line

option was used). Once the user exits the Help screen, he sees the split screen menu for

choosing packages to install (or remove).

The top part of the screen is a relatively narrow window into the list of Debian's 15400

packages; the bottom part of the screen contains description of the package or group of

packages which are highlighted above.