Hi, I am showing zypper to quite a few scientists and developers these days. They all love it but most of them actually think at first that "name" is the primary key and alias is some sort of optional field. May be alias should be called 'id' or 'key' or something like that. Or 'alias' could be called 'name' and 'name' could be called 'description' or 'label' or 'caption' or 'info' or something like that. just my 2 cents dipe

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jan Kupec" To: zypp-devel@opensuse.org Subject: Re: [zypp-devel] repo alias vs. name Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 11:04:59 +0200

See also https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=309041#c6 and the following comments.

Jan Kupec wrote:

...

Hi,

i would like to achieve a new agreement about repository alias and name usage.

The *last agreement* is to *use alias internaly* by applications and *present name to the user* (see [1]). YaST now uses the URL as both the alias and the name by default and allows the user to change the name. But then you get a mess like this in zypper:

$ zypper sl # | Enabled | Refresh | Type | Name

| URI

--+---------+---------+-------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | No | Yes | yast2 | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-Factory-non-oss/inst-source-ext... | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-Factory-non-oss/inst-source-ext...

2 | Yes | Yes | yast2 | stable

| ftp://dist.suse.de/install/stable-x86 3 | No | Yes | yast2 | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/

| http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/ 4 | No | Yes | yast2 | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory-debug/inst-source-d... | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory-debug/inst-source-d...

In addition, zypper uses alias to as argment in repo handling commands and options (ok, you can use repo number (after i reimplement it - soon), but then you need to use zypper repos/lr/sl to list them each time).

Another thing is, that libzypp names the .repo files in /etc/zypp/repos.d according to the alias, which again creates a mess if urls are used.

My *proposal* is to use *alias as a short name* and the *name as a long name*. I.e., to use a user specified *short name/alias* as both alias and name by default, and leave the possibility to change the long name later (if not specified when ading the repo).

IMO, this way, the overall user experience (mainly for zypper users but also for YaST users) will increase.

If you don't like this idea for some reasons (e.g. the YaST users will need to enter the alias in addition to the URL, although they might like it :O), please, at least let's use something different internally in YaST for the alias, not the URL. Something shorter.

[1] https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=298035

Cheers,

Jano

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