Martin Schlander wrote:
Onsdag den 1. april 2009 05:57:20 skrev Ricardo Cornet:
Something I did not include in the previous mail, partly because I forgot /partly because It can be implemented independently of the usability improved minimalistic yast is a extra tab for the yast software manager.
This tab would focus on desktop applications exclusively. For example when I want to install one simple application for example openoffice, dozens of package appear, regular users are puzzled by it and don't get anywhere, and advanced users have to look out for the one right package to install or rigorous one-by-one selection.
I'd like to hear your opinions.
I think history is full of examples of trying to make things easier and more minimalistic, and things ending up more confusing complex and unreliable and/or not doing what people need.
I think that would be because many things were not well done, planned or left half-done. If the minimalistic approach for a simple way to access to services and getting things done fail is because the implementation is bad. Just as using electrical cars instead of oil fueled cars today is not practical yet due to high costs and low battery efficiency among other reasons. If it is done right I don't think anyone would complain. After all nobody forces you nor anyone else to use it. If the implementation is bad, it means I failed to make it easy and simple to use.
Instead of doing it in a tab, maybe it could be done using a filter. Similarly to how Mandriva does it. So when you start up YaST software manager by default it will only search for gui apps. I guess this could be fairly easily integrated into the existing filter structure.
Actually I thought of that, the tab is a container just to separate the packages view, from the application view. The packages view remains as always, but the application view has to way to look for apps. The classical text search and a category/groups listing/navigaton panel to navigate through the categories, sub-categories and app names with their descriptions.
Hope this image shows the Mandriva approach clearly - look at the top left combobox http://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers/2009/mandriva-2009-software- management.jpg
Btw. as I understand it, with the software managers unlike other YaST-modules you don't get both Qt and GTK "for free". So do you plan to do this for Qt _and_ GTK, or only or the other?
Well yast does have the groups filter, but works for packages. Well, I may have make a ncurses version as well :-). Well since is a desktop app finder/installer/manager both qt and gtk version would be necessary, but would be front-ends to some of the same code. After all if you do a zypper ref && zypper up, the desktop-apps must be upgraded as well and I would need to touch some of libzypp which works for both gui-environments. Ricardo Cornet -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org