Ideas from Usenix
Now life here has settled down again, I though I'd pass along some
suggestions for improvement picked up from people at Usenix last month. If
people like these, I may find some time to start simple implementations of
the first two...
#1: Tip of the day
------------------
Something that many of the Office-type applications do to provide
(sometimes) useful hints to users, such as highlighting features of the
program or shortcuts through long operations etc. I've heard this
suggested several times as something we could use also. It would be
trivial to set up: simply add a fortune text database file to each
package, containing a few hints. Run an indexing program out of cron
(hourly? daily?) to ensure the system is current.
A clever thing to do here is also tune the output of the program so that
the more commonly-used packages are the ones that will produce help nost
often, say by checking the atime of a specified file owned by each
package. We could possibly split things on a per-user basis, so (for
example) normal users don't get swamped with hints on how to configure
bind or build a kernel but instead get help with their applications.
A call to this could (of course) go into /etc/profile so that people get
help with each login, or (and more of this later) on the xdm login screen
in a simple text widget.
Implementation should be fairly simple, copying much of the detail from
the menu system - simple config files, easily edited and easy to maintain.
#2: Credits
-----------
The xdm login display by default is quite boring and not very pretty. As
it is something a lot of people will see first when using a Debian
machine, can we not do something flashy with it? A simple suggestion is to
create a small scrolling banner listing (in a random order?) the
developers of the software on the system, either the Debian developers,
upstream developers, or both.
Again, this would be easy to add. Another file in each package listing the
developers involved, and an indexing program out of cron. The main package
(called xdm-credits?) would include a small starter list, including the
names of other Debian people who don't maintain packages etc.
#3: Dpkg enhancement
--------------------
(Already suggested to Ian last night; what do other people think?)
Many of the users are prepared to try out new packages when they see them
in dselect. They like the way that dependencies are met: if package foo
needs library bar, then dselect will tell them and automatically select
bar for installation. But what happens when foo is deinstalled because the
user doesn't like it or no longer needs it? Currently, the library will be
left behind even if no other package is using it, which is a bit of a
waste of disk... If we can keep a reference count of how many packages
depend on each, then when a given program/library is no longer depended
upon we can suggest it be removed. Of course, we will also need a flag for
each package to say if it was selected by the user or automatically
flagged for installation; if selected manually then the user probably
wants to keep it, of course...
Thoughts?
--
Steve McIntyre stevem@chiark.greenend.org.uk
"Can't keep my eyes from the circling sky,
"Tongue-tied & twisted, Just an earth-bound misfit, I..."
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