On 11/09/2014 06:59 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
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.
I search online to figure out the name of said app first and then search
for it on the system. Especially for the PDF conversion case because
there are *so* many utilities for that sort of thing but each only does
a few niche things well. Even if each one had a profile in GNOME
software, it's not going to have all the little nitty gritty details I'd
be better served with from an in-depth blog post or forum post or
whatever about in. (I say this having had to do many apparently rather
freaky conversions esp. with PDF and EPS and color spaces over the
years, thanks vendor friends.)
That's great. We all do that. Wasn't there an XKCD where he explained
that everyone thought that he was good at computers, but 90% of that was
that he knew how to use Google?
But if that little app isn't there in the out-of-the-box "Applications"
installer utility, what should a user do?
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.
Oh, right.
This is a good case for using DevAssistant. And the professors aren't
telling them what to install to get their assignments done? (?!) Do they
not have lab sessions where part of the first class is spent configuring
their laptops to complete assignments? Even some of my 400-level comp
sci classes had environment configuration stuff in the first lecture.
Maybe things have gotten better, but for my coursework the instructions
were "use language X. it's installed on the lab computers. If you want
to develop and test on your own computer, that's fine. Make sure it runs
on the lab computers too."
At the instigation of this thread, I just checked out DevAssistant -
it's pretty neat, and it even suggested some utilities that I had
forgotten about. It should probably concern someone that I've never
heard of DA before. But not all package-finding missions are about *that
kind* of developer tool.
What about Python's Twisted framework? Netcat? Nmap? Erlang?
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!)
gcc is most definitely something that a Fedora Workstation user may
(probably will) search for. And expect to find. And if the
out-of-the-box application installer tool doesn't find it, they will be
confused. Just because there are 73 other ways to end up with gcc on
your system (none of which include using the out-of-the-box-default
installer utility) doesn't mean that it will be easy for a user to find
those.
The only counter-example I've heard for why the yum/dnf metadata won't
find what you want is someone who tried to find gvim, but that sounds
like a red herring. That's just poor packaging. Who would think to call
it vim-X11? I've never heard it called that. And it's especially weird
to not even mention "gvim" somewhere in the description. That's a
packaging bug and someone should fix that.
Why can't the default packaging selector app be a do-it-all app? The
defaults can restrict searches to whatever the definition of
"Application", but let the user use the full power of the packaging
system's metadata.
-Adam Batkin
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