average joe doesn't want to use yum, he wants to be able to double click an icon on his desktop and have things taken care of. no command line, no searching through a gui.
now, say he wants to install the cd2ogg rpm from http://www.linuxadvocate.net/yum/fedora/1/linuxadvocate/cd2ogg-2.1-fc1.i386.rpm
now, he doesn't have cdparanoia installed (which is one of the requirements) but doesn't want to add my yum repository since this is basically a one off install... so, all he really should do (ideally in his mind) is click on the rpm link which should bring up the option in mozilla/firefox to use a helper application. it downloads, the helper application loads the rpm, says you need cdparanoia and installs that along with the rpm. no command line required, IT'S TAKEN CARE OF FOR HIM.
Duncan brings up a really good point here: installing an application is extraordinarily simple in other operating systems. In Windows, all you have to do is run the downloaded file, which launches the installer. In Mac OS X, You simply drag the image to the Applications folder.
Installing something, ANYTHING, ought to be at least as simple as launching an installer. So the default behaviour for an RPM on the desktop (or getting it from a link) ought to be to bring up a dialogue window that does something along the lines of beginning to check dependencies to install the package. If any required packages are not present, as in the case of cd2ogg needing cdparanoia, the dialogue informs the user. It then, perhaps, lets him pick a mirror (or, I imagine, torrent tracker) from which to download the requirement, gets and installs it.
The way packages are installed still needs to be thought of more in users' terms; most users of Windows or Mac OS know that there's a dirt-simple way of installing applications and although Linux has come a very long way in a very short time, it's still not easy enough that my dad could install a package without a lot of help from me (read: me, installing it for him).
-- Robert D.
-------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Dumas // robdumas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://obnoxio.us/ // AIM: ThisMessIAmIn -------------------------------------------------------------- My OpenPGP public key is available at: http://obnoxio.us/about/publickey/
