Thanks for both of the replies! Craig Sanders said,
if the article is recommending dselect then it's years out of date.
it was good in its day, but it really wasn't designed to cope with 30,000+ packages - it just takes too long to make your selections.
IMO, the same applies to aptitude but the user-interface is a lot easier, and the dependancy/conflict resolution works better.
I prefer the way it works particularly on how it displays dependencies. I find uisng dselect and dpkg I can get exactly what I want, something I found impossible with aptitude. I do not use synaptic as last time a tried it it used the gnome libraries, and I do not have these on my system. I use the great and as yet unsurpassed fvwm for a window manager.
rather than select them manually, you can create a list of packages to install and use 'dpkg --set-selection' to select them. 'apt-get dist-upgrade' will then install them all.
I have tried this I found it works OK copying an existing Debian version, ie say 6.0.6 to 6.0.6 but failed somehow between major versions 5.0 to 6.0. From memory it did no get all the packages due to name changes, one then had go through the system in fine detail to work out what was missing, as major debian version changes are rare the time taken to manually select packages is not an issue after all it only has to be done once no matter how many systems one has. Another __very__ important aspect is it allows one time to go through all the packages to see what neat new items have been included. in amongst those 30,000 odd packages there are some __real__ gems hidden. The phrase "One can't see the forest for the trees" pops to mind. Using Linux know for over 20 years, Lindsay