Nicolas Mailhot (nicolas.mailhot@xxxxxxxxxxx) said: > Well, maybe comps was not intended to be a lot of things, but when it > was decided not to fix rpm groups and use comps as the only > classification method of yum repositories, comps graduated to another > level. Then perhaps it's time to revisit that problem. (insert dream sequence music here) Say I'm a generic Fedora user. I want to install a music player. I fire up the software tool. I now have the choice of *78* different packages under sound and video. First, I have to sort through the packages that aren't music players, by reading to see what they are... -'A Better CD Encoder'? No. - 'Audio mixer that uses ncurses'? No. And what's a ncurses? - 'An AdLib (OPL2) music player'? Maybe that's what I want - I wonder what AdLib is? Is that like an iPod? - 'Rewrite of the xawtv webcam app, which adds imlib2 support'? Why do I care? - 'The Jack Audio Connection Kit'? Well, I'm sure that means something to someone. Now, that I can sort of pick out 10-20 packages that might be want I want, how can I make a good decision? How do I choose between 'Media player for KDE' 'Xine-based media player' 'Multimedia applications for the K Desktop Environment' 'Music Management Application' 'Free multimedia player' 'The X MultiMedia System, a media player' Ideally, I'd get information like screenshots, user ratings, reviews, descriptions of specific features. But that's all the information I have. So I sit there confused, pick one at random, or install them all. I then hop on my handy dandy Fedora forum somewhere, and ask why one of them doesn't work for me, and someone says: <dude> don't use that, that sucks! why would you pick that! And I am now sad. And that's *with* a list of culled and vetted packages. Perhaps I could use the 'search' interface for packages. So I search for 'music player'. It includes some of the same results (but not most of them, including pretty much any that you'd want), and such gems as: hfsplus-tools - Tools to create/check Apple HFS+ filesystems Yes, that's it! (As an aside, I'd say that if you wanted a text-based mixer, searching for 'text mixer' is an infinitely better way to do it than browsing a list for aumix. And the search doesn't find it.) Let's try a different example. I'm a python coder, and I want to find a library for doing cryptography and hashing - MD5, SSL, etc. So, I go to the 'Python Development' Group in pirut. I scroll through the list, looking for something that looks relevant. (See above). This is even better now, because there are 500 sets of python bindings. Ideally, we'd have a browsing interface that states things like: API Categories: Network connections Cryptography Graphics Processing Applied Math Besides Those Two Non-Applied Math Math Is Hard - Shopping Cart Handling and each of them would have links to various packages, which would include: - API reference - API/ABI stability - standardization (is this core python? Is it in the LSB? Is it a recommended API by Fedora) - reviews, examples, etc. Again, comps does not help you here. Now, I could search, again. But "python crypto" yields nothing. So, in short, I think the comps push, while fitting in our current infrastructure, isn't really solving the *right* problem. We need a better interface... something like Amazon or freshmeat or <insert handwaving>. And, we need better search. Right now, it looks like it's doing direct globs without wildcards - i.e., if you enter 'foo bar' on a line, it needs to match *exactly* 'foo bar' in either the summary or description. Ideally, it should be more like google - split the query into words, find what matches those words, sort by number of words matched and proximity. Simple google-like matching (+,-, quoting) would make it simpler, and fit the methods people are used to. Bill -- fedora-extras-list mailing list fedora-extras-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list
