On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 6:08 PM, Lars Seipel <lars.seipel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When you don't know the name of the thing you want (or, even, if something like it exists at all) it gets messy, though. Say I need some program to convert weird document format X into PDFs or do some other random task. As searching and browsing available programs with yum is not a particularly pleasant activity I go for Gnome Software.
Using it is a nice experience but it doesn't get me any results for my search. I think 'aww crap, no tool for me in the repos' although there are two perfectly fine command-line programs in Fedora I'd be happy to know about.
I think that the above, though, is a bit different than having say python-babel in GNOME software.
People on this list might know they have to search for "packages" when there're no "applications" available. That's not true for everyone. My anecdotal experience from helping out fellow students suggests it's a common issue. They need a C compiler, bison and make to do assignments and it just doesn't show up in Ubuntu's software center (at least it didn't then, maybe they changed that). They don't know what to do and ask someone with more experience. Well, sometimes at least. The other (at least as common) option is to start googling and then paste random commands from some website into a root shell.
I agree with you that dumping gigantic lists of packages on the screen isn't a solution. But just dismissing the problem as "it's for applications only" isn't that great, either. Not when most users probably think of "applications" as being the same thing as programs in general.
I think a couple of things are being conflated:
- GUI app vs command line app
- App vs non-app (e.g. library, codec, driver, etc.)
I'm with you on the first one - I think more command line apps should be included. However, I'm not so sure that something like GCC counts as a 'command line app.' (I mean, kinda sorta, but not really!) Even when doing C development on my system, I have never installed the gcc package specifically - I use the development package group. For a lot of libraries needs to compile an app, I also don't typically install the packages one-by-one, I do yum-builddep. I think DevAssistant has an option similar to yum-builddep. I also think it does a bit better than installing the development package group, because it's a bit more granular and you can pick particular languages and frameworks of focus and not install everything that could be used for development.
~m
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