On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 09:55 +0200, Martin Schlander wrote:

Den Monday 07 May 2007 06:36:06 skrev Justin Haygood:

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After all of the package management discussion, I had an idea. Why not port Ubuntu's gnome-app-install to zypp for GNOME users? (Or create our own). This will provide an easy to use interface to install applications (not packages, not patterns, applications!). Why is this needed? Aunt Jill or Grandpa Bill or Cousin Fred who used Windows doesn't know or care what a package is, but knows very much what an application is.

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What do people think? I'm very willing to commit resources (programming abilities and free time) for this idea.

I'm not quite sure. We've just gotten rid of a lot of dublicate software management tools for 10.3. Should we add more? IMHO: yes we should! It's not really duplicate software. It's software for a different use-case (synaptic and yast's sw_single would be duplicates in this regard). You have a wide user spectrum out there. You can't serve the whole spectrum with one software. Especially when the software is about a very technical topic like software management.

I don't follow Ubuntu very closely, but it seems to me the "add/remove"-thingy causes a great deal of confusion - once you tell people: "you can use add/remove for this, but you have to use synaptic for that". If I'm not mistaken the add/remove-thingy is rather limited. And that's basically the point of the "add/remove"-thingy. It's limited for a good reason: A user searching for an email client, typing 'email' into the search field should not be distracted by emacs-addons, mutts, and so on.

Might be better to just have the one tool - sometimes things are made more complicated when you try to make them easier.

I don't agree that people need to understand about packages to use sw_single. .. just fire it up -> search for Thunderbird -> tick it off -> Click accept. Well in this case, they have to know that they _want_ thunderbird. Try

It's a tool for desktop users not familiar with the concept of packages and dependencies and such things. Thus a lot of functionality is not needed / wanted. The trend even goes to more separation: e.g. codecs get installed by a helper application called from a player. Maybe we will at some point even see an OpenOffice dialog telling you to install msttcorefonts, when you open a word document or something like that (just fooling around here). The "add/remove"-solution from Ubuntu might not be the last call, but it surely is an interesting approach to the problem of "software management for the uninitiated". this: start up yast with its standard search options, enter 'email' into the search field and boom... no thunderbird! Of course, ticking the 'Description'-Option should do the trick, shouldn't it? No. On further investigation the description doesn't even contain the word 'email'. Even in this case, add/remove would be a far better bet than sw_single, because it is a filter for the uninitiated. It actually just contains applications that will show up in the application-menu and some exceptions to this rule. It might not serve your needs (Assuming you're an expert, because you refer to yast's software management as sw_single), but there is a bunch of people at the other side of the usage spectrum, who might find such a tool a nice starting point when searching for a certain application. Again: add/remove definitely is not the last call, but killing ideas up-front without trying is not a solution either. Regards, Josh -- Jörg Kreß <jkress@suse.de> YaST2 Development _________________________________________________________________ SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

A tech discussion on IRC would be good. I'll write a detailed technical proposal on what features I'd like to see and post them on my website (and link to it here) soonish. Remember, this should be useable, easy enough, and approachable by total computer illiterates, and by this I mean new computer users (I'm thinking my fiance's mother, my mother's friend personally), and not just people who've used Windows as a beginner for a while and now moving to Linux. On 5/7/07, Benji Weber <b.weber@warwick.ac.uk> wrote:

On 5/7/07, Justin Haygood <jhaygood@spsu.edu> wrote:

...

After all of the package management discussion, I had an idea. Why not port Ubuntu's gnome-app-install to zypp for GNOME users? (Or create our own). This will provide an easy to use interface to install applications (not packages, not patterns, applications!). Why is this needed? Aunt Jill or Grandpa Bill or Cousin Fred who used Windows doesn't know or care what a package is, but knows very much what an application is.

Agreed.

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What I forsee:

1. An easy to use Application Installer that prompts for root password only before installation 2. The Application Installer has a list of applications in various categories, with the icon, name, description, and potentially user reviews, screenshots, etc.. (similar to Linspire CNR) 3. Uses zypp sources to provide the package data, extra information can come from a web service. 4. Installation happens natively using zypp

Sounds good, but to be really successful this needs more metadata than is available in the package repositories already. For example we need ratings, tags, icons, screenshots, links to relevant documentation.

It also needs to be read-write so users can contribute to improving these, and get recommendations "Other people who installed kopete also installed konversation". (Think last.fm but for software).

See pascal's software portal mockup: http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/files/swportal/mockup/mockup.jpg (http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2007-05/msg00084.html)

We can easily make this web based with the single click install feature which hopefully should make its way into the distro before long.

In addition we can expose all the features that are available through the web based portal through an web service to enable client side yast/kde/gnome interaction with it.

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What do people think? I'm very willing to commit resources (programming abilities and free time) for this idea.

Great.

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It would probably need to be broken down until 3 parts:

1. C++ Library to fetch application information from zypp and web services 2. GTK/GNOME front-end 3. KDE/Qt front-end

I would say

1: Backend to collect and organise metadata from repositories & user input. 2: Web Service frontend exposing all required features. 3: Web based portal - most flexible, and quickest to get off the ground, and enables anyone with a web browser to contribute the vital tagging, organisation, images, and statistics needed to make it a success. 4: Client side frontend - using YaST would give us GTK+ and Qt and ncurses and command line frontends for free. This might require some extension of yast's UI capabilities which would benefit all YaST modules. KDE/Gnome clients not based on yast would also be possible, but possibly a waste of time.

All in all this is a lot of work, but by no means unachievable, a significant portion is already available in the automatic trawling and organising of repository metadata for http://benjiweber.co.uk:8080/webpin/ package search, which is exposed through a web service and can be used from clients (see http://benjiweber.co.uk/packagesearch-yast.png for screenshot of yast querying the pakcage search). "install now" links are available both for the web based version and the local client. (More on design http://en.opensuse.org/Package_Search)

The biggest piece of work is combining user input with the above, storing user tagging, search statistics, links, and other metadata.

Quite a few people have expressed an interest in contributing to this project in one form or another. I suggest we arrange a technical planning IRC meeting to enable some more interactive discussion on the matter.

_ Benjamin Weber --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

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