On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 09:55 +0200, Martin Schlander wrote:
Den Monday 07 May 2007 06:36:06 skrev Justin Haygood:
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.
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