This might be interesting for a couple of people of this list. Klaus ----- Forwarded message from Dan Kegel ----- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 01:56:46 -0700 From: Dan Kegel To: packaging@lists.freestandards.org Subject: [packaging] Quick usability test of app battery on Ubuntu Hi all, I missed the first part of the packaging discussion at DAM-4, but attended the tail end. The notes from the discussion are online at http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Dam-4_breakout_packaging There was talk about the LSB App Battery at the meeting, so I decided to see if the average Ubuntu user could easily install and use those LSB-packaged apps. http://www.linux-foundation.org/appbat is the home page for the app battery. For x86, it directs the user to http://ftp.freestandards.org/pub/lsb/app-battery/released/ia32/ which is a raw list of downloadable packages, e.g. http://ftp.freestandards.org/pub/lsb/app-battery/released/ia32/lsb-xpaint_2.... Clicking on that link on my Ubuntu Feisty system did in fact download and install the package with very little fuss, and the app does run. Yay! There were some hitches in the user experience, though. Here's a (fairly picky) list; don't worry if some of these are unreasonable. 0. The user has to know where to go to download the app battery. Ideally the apps in the app battery should show up in Feisty's "Add/Remove Software" program, where users normally go to look for software. 1. When I ran Feisty's "Add/Remove Software" program, and asked it to show me all installed software, lsb-xpaint didn't show up! (Is that list solely driven by repositories somehow?) 2. The app did not integrate into my system menus. It really should, shouldn't it? Even though this would require a minor violation of the /opt rule, I think it's worth it. We certainly do this for Picasa. 3. The app did not show up on my default path (and indeed, feisty has its own xpaint, so there's a minor clash). I suspect we should call the binary lsb-xpaint, and put a link to it in /usr/bin, even though that violates the /opt rule (again, we do this for Picasa, otherwise users will hate us). 4. If the package lsb-core is not installed, the lsb-xpaint package will happily install, but running /opt/lsb/appbat/bin/xpaint just says bash: /opt/lsb/appbat/bin/xpaint: No such file or directory Ideally the package would either have refused to install, or would have automatically triggered the install of lsb-core etc. (I don't recall if lsb-core is installed by default on Feisty. I suppose it is, but I don't know how to check. If it's not, that's a big black mark for usability.) In my copious spare time, perhaps I will look into addressing a few of these issues. - Dan _______________________________________________ packaging mailing list packaging@lists.freestandards.org http://lists.freestandards.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging ----- End forwarded message ----- --- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-softwaremgmt+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-softwaremgmt+help@opensuse.org