Ludovic Brenta wrote:
Stephen Leake wrote:
[...] "how does someone new to Debian discover all the Ada packages that are available".
And "how can he/she easily install a complete Ada development environment".
The answer could be the same, or it could be "run the aptitude character based GUI, and type some obsure commands", or it could be "run the Synaptic modern GUI, use the buttons to search for gnat in 'dependencies'".The latter seems likely to be the closest to the "typical" modern user's expectations, except that they will be more likely to try searching for "Ada" in "description and name" first, and get _lots_ of false positives (that's what I just did :).
I think we should expect people to search for "Ada". How can we help them get most out of that query?
The Synaptic search requires use of a rodent-like attachment :), gives some false positives, and leaves out libopentoken-dbg (I'm not clear why).That's why I think that ensuring that all Ada packages are linked with one another in some sensible way would be a big help.
I don't think I ever used dependency browsing as a way to find Ada packages. (But then; I still use apt-get, so I may not be a typical user.)
Note: there is a fourth answer: use debtags. This is available both in aptitude and in synaptic; but it requires brave souls to add tags to each package and that's not done in the debian/control files but externally in a tags database.
How do the users benefit from debtags? Does Synaptic give search results with matching debtags higher priority than those with matching descriptions?
Now we are talking about a different problem; how to install packages once we find out about them.I'd like this to be as immediate as possible; there should not be separate commands.
Wouldn't my suggestion of a dummy "Ada developer's complete toolbox" package solve this?
I doubt _any_ user will want to simply install "everything that uses Ada". I expect them to browse the list, decide to install a couple of packages to start with, and type:aptitude install libopentoken-dev libgnadesqlite-dev or just click on the check boxes in Synaptic.
I find that process so annoying, so I have created an awful hack, which installs all the Ada packages I know of in one step. I just want to have everything available fast. Once we are in a situation where Debian has five Ada libraries for each problem, it might not be the ideal situation, but right now visibility and easy access is more important.
Greetings, Jacob -- There really was only one way to make a person unlearn something ...