-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 James Ogley wrote:
Just a thought that had been going through my head over the weekend...
Funny, I had some thoughts about the same thing recently ;)
At the moment on OpenSUSE.org, we provide a link on the Download page to the information on external YaST repositories, and there has been talk of making some of them available in YaST as an option in future versions.[1] [1] Note that those external repositories need to be set to refresh on YaST startup.
Yes, I think that's badly needed. As I already posted in some of my mails on the main list, it seems that our 3rd party repositories are too difficult to find and to install. Even on the main list, a few users said they didn't know about our repositories although they were using SUSE Linux for some time. A similar system to what YOU does would be nice, IMHO: - - refresh the list of available repositories at startup, from a central location, e.g. opensuse.org - - have some simple metadata format for the repositories, e.g. including a description of the kind of packages to expect in that repository (bleeding-edge gnome, multimedia, anything..) - - have a simple dialog for the end-user to add or remove those repositories (a check list, basically), and as you said: they must be added with auto-refresh turned on Of course, add a big fat disclaimer that Novell is not responsible nor liable for the content of those repositories, they might break your system, they're not tested by Novell, that they might install packages you're not allowed to depending on the laws in your countries, yadda yadda, IANAL ;)
Thing is that that's for sw_single and the same doesn't also apply for online_update - it can only have one source of packages at a time, and to say to users: "Sometimes you will want to run the Online Update option in YaST to get the latest updates, but sometimes you'll want to run the Software Management option is little counter-intuitive.[2] I would like to suggest it be consolidated into a single component that handles adding and removing packages, as well as updating from all YaST sources, and SUSE update trees. That's all I'm going to say about it now, any thoughts?
I second that. Actually I would propose to re-think the current concept of YaST2's Software Management module. To me, it should be an aggregator of package information from various sources: - - SUSE repositories - - supplemental, if checked - - 3rd party repositories, if checked - - Online Update (or not, if it is obsoleted by YaST2 Software Management) I'd also suggest to define some metadata format to "mechanize" that information, and all the 3rd party packagers would have to provide such metadata to be integrated into the "YaST2 Software Central" (or whatever). XML seems well-suited for that purpose (also because it can be directly transformed to, say, HTML). That metadata could include things like: - - package name, package version, release (obviously) - - release scope: new features, bugfix, security fix - - version state: beta, stable - - changelog information - - description - - link to project website - - screenshot(s) Screenshot(s) may sound futile, but... how about providing some kde-apps.org-like interface ? See for yourself: http://kde-apps.org (but I guess everyone on this list knows that site already ;)) Actually that's kde-apps.org and freshmeat.net alike. Note that e.g. the freshmeat.net project metadata (XML) can already be used for most of the stuff above. I do so already, but only for part of the information (see my previous post on the list about my little script and emacs macro that fetches that data). Obviously, and that's probably the reason why this will never happen, implement all of this requires a major YaST2 overhaul, especially as far as the Software Management module is concerned :\
In fact, is anyone else on this list? ;) Yep ;)
- -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\ <pascal.bleser@skynet.be> <guru@unixtech.be> __v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDQP5sr3NMWliFcXcRAoOsAJ9Zeb1+/VSxiI/DnACpUV5qchxnKACfXm5Y DKOCSk+FUHR0H56/wbnRR6c= =rPbr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----