[Synaptic-devel] Where's the logic in that?

[Gustaf Räntilä]

Hi all,

First of all, I'm not on the list, so you need to cc me, so that I can get your replies.

Now, this has bothered me for a couple of.. dunno.. years? and it strikes me that the behaviour is still like this...

When synaptic fails to download all files, I get a dialog telling me this. Something like:
"Synaptic couldn't fetch all packages, do you want to continue anyway?" [yes / no]

Now,
here I don't know what to press. Should I expect dpkg and all the
beauty surrounding it to "just work" when some packages are missing?
Well, generally no. I don't trust any package program on my system
(let's say I have had a couple of nightmare issues over the last
decade). No complaint, dpkg _is_ good. Generally. But it has an evil
feature of sometimes making me spend a night "fixing things" manually.
However, if it's just some silly package from an unsupported
(non-debian) source, who cares if it couldn't be fetched, I'll try
later.
But how do I know that? How do I know what to press?

I
press no because I hate package issues (I use debian sid, so, well
things break sometimes). Now _after_ I press "no", a dialog box tells
me what packages couldn't be fetched.
Please tell me, where's the logic in that? Wouldn't it be like
_much_ more reasonable to expect that information _before_ you force
people to ask the question? I use the word "force", because dialog
boxes are always evil (although sometimes necessary). So, when you
force someone to answer a dialog box question, _make sure_ the user is
enlightened with all necessary information to be able to rationally
anwer the question. Don't spit that critical information in their face
afterwords, laughing silently. It's like saying "watch out for the hole
in the ground" after someone fell down in it.

Other than this abomination, synaptic is pretty great, so thanks for the app,
Gustaf