“There are over 500 Debian maintainers today, up from 100 only a
few years ago. Wichert Akkerman has been Project Leader for this
brilliant, sometimes unruly (but always interesting) gang since
February. Monday you posted questions for Wichert. Today you get
answers.”
“Considerable improvements have gone into the “back end,”
apt-get; while there has been some experimentation with gnome-apt
and console-apt, there doesn’t seem to yet be anything that
unambiguously improves on dselect in terms of functionality.
With the things that have been learned from those attempts, is
there likely to be some sort of dselect-ng?”
“Wichert:
I really hope so. The reason that we don’t have a
super-glitchy-totally-awesome apt frontend at the moment is that we
have nobody who is willing and able to invest the time and effort
into making it. Unlike a commercial distribution, we can’t just say
`oh, this would be cool. You there! Write this for us and we’ll
give you some money.’ Somebody has to decide for himself that it is
an interesting project and make it. We can only encourage people to
do something and be very thankful when they do. At this moment the
only interactive frontends (that I know off) are dselect,
gnome-apt, console-apt, Corel Update (formerly/also called get_it)
and aptitude. I would like to ab^H^Huse this opportunity to invite
people to write a good frontend or finish console-apt. The apt
library is really powerful and does everything you want it to do,
the only thing missing is the frontend…”