Adding programs

[John Summerfield <debian herakles homelinux org>]

Years go, adding programs from the installation was a royal pain. One had to 
search the CDs, try to install something, find there were prerequisite 
packages, find them and so on....

I thought I'd see how RH hs andvanced since those times, see if it's caught up 
with Debian, so I hunted round the menus and eventually found Add/Remove 
Applications in Settings.
Eh?
I thought this was a "system tool."

I hunted up and down and made some selections. I couldn't find strace, the 
program I actually wanted, but there were some other things that seemed 
interesting. I also deselected some.

It amounted to about 3 Mbytes and I clicked "Update."

It whirred and fizzed for a while (this is a steam-powered computer) and 
eventually popped up a dialogue:
"Packages not found."
elfutils
perl-XML-Dumper
gettext
/bin/gettext
17 in all, some of them duplicates.

It doesn't actually offer help in fixing this, just tells me to do it.

In contrast, in Debian (which I've been using for a while) I'd say something 
like
apt-get install strace
and apt-get would find what other packages are needed and offer to install 
those too. It would also ask me for the correct CDs.

I expected this to just work, as well as it does in Debian.

It doesn't seem to me that up2date is the answer either.

What should one do?

-- 
Cheers
John