Giovanni Campagna wrote: > While we do have two nice UIs (gpk-application and apper) for package > management, having to deal with packages, with no icons and no > translations is not appropriate for end users. We do have translations of the fields that it's meaningful to translate – summary and description – and the translations are displayed by RPM, Yum and Packagekit. (Of course all the translations need to be written by someone, and that work isn't complete.) One thing that we surprisingly don't have is titles on the packages. With "title" I mean the name of the program or library as it would be written in normal English prose with English grammar taken into account. An application installer GUI for nontechnical users should display the title of each application, but it's currently impossible to write an algorithm to find out the title of a Fedora package. The package name is a technical name that often contains structure showing how the package is related to other packages. It's restricted to English letters, digits and a selected few other characters. The name is often an abbreviation of the title witten in all lowercase, whereas the title should be written in title case and may contain spaces, apostrophes, accents et cetera. I think it makes sense to write the full title in the summary field, together with a very short description showing what the package is used for. Some packages have this, but many others have only a generic description in this field. For GUI applications it may make sense for the application installer to look in the desktop file, but not all packages have a desktop file, and even when they do it doesn't always contain the title. In some cases only the description field contains the full title. This field is meant for a somewhat long description that you wouldn't want to display in a list of packages, and programmatically extracting the title from the text is unreliable. A few case studies: Name: Zim Summary: Desktop wiki & notekeeper Description: Zim is a WYSIWYG text editor written in PyGTK [...] zim.desktop: Name=Zim Desktop Wiki zim.desktop: Comment=Edit text files "wiki style" zim.desktop: GenericName=Text Editor Here the package name is the title, in title case even. The summary shows what the program is for. This may seem like the best way to do it, but the problem is that not all packages can use their title for their package name. The desktop file makes it look like the full title is "Zim Desktop Wiki", which I don't think is what the author of Zim intended. Name: totem Summary: Movie player for GNOME Description: Totem is simple movie player for the GNOME desktop. [...] totem.desktop: Name=Movie Player totem.desktop: Comment=Play movies and songs The package name is the title in lowercase. Only the description contains the title capitalized. The summary and the desktop file describe what the program does, but are completely unhelpful to users who care about which video player they use. The best way to get the title would be to take the package name and convert it to title case. Name: angrydd Summary: Falling blocks game Description: In Angry, Drunken Dwarves (ADD), you are an angry, [...] fedora-angrydd.desktop: Name=Angry Drunken Dwarves This title contains spaces and a comma, so the package name is an abbreviation of the title. The summary is very generic. The description contains the full title, but there's another word before it so an attempt to take the beginning of the description to get the title would fail. The desktop file contains the title except for the comma. Name: alex4 Summary: Alex the Allegator 4 - Platform game Description: In the latest installment of the series Alex travels [...] fedora-alex4.desktop: Name=Alex the Allegator 4 fedora-alex4.desktop: Comment=Old school platform game Again, the package name is an abbreviation of the title. The summary contains the full title and also shows what the program does. This summary is all that is needed in a list of packages. Displaying both the name and the comment from the desktop file would also work. The description does not contain the title. Name: zile Summary: Zile Is Lossy Emacs Description: Zile is a small Emacs clone. [...] Regardless of whether "Zile Is Lossy Emacs" or just "Zile" should be considered the full title, this summary contains the title and also describes fairly well what the program does. At least anyone who might possibly want to use it will get an idea of what it is. Displaying only the summary in a list would be quite sufficient. There is no desktop file. As you can see, there's no one field that always contains the title, and there's no way a program can try them one at a time to arrive at the best choice. This is in my opinion the most important thing to improve when it comes to package management. Björn Persson
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