Re: first draft "aptitude howto"

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu>]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 10:03:42PM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg was heard to say:
> In article <cistron.20000328003239.A7694@lina.inka.de>,
> Bernd Eckenfels  <ecki@lina.inka.de> wrote:
> >With those two keys you usually will type 'u' and then 'f' in aptitude to
> >reset it to its default working mode. In that mode you have a list of:
> >
> >If you have a packe selected, you will get information about it in the
> >status line. The 'i' key will show the information/description of the
> >package, the <enter> key a more complete information about the debian
> >package system values for this package. To leave the information screens,
> >you can use the 'q' key. Within the main tree, the 'q' key will quit the
> >program.
> 
> .. etc
> 
> I see you need to know a lot of keys. I think that is non-intuitive;
> a full screen interface should have pulldown menus (perhaps with
> shortcuts), a command line interface has switches.

  I don't particularly personally like pulldown menus..they clutter up the
interface and (worse) can be a pain to write from scratch.  Also, I don't
really see how a pulldown is less non-intuitive than a simple keybinding.

  HOWEVER, I would be willing to add this feature.  I believe it can be added
without seriously disrupting the rest of the program; try adding it in the
vscreen layer.  You may need to do some other redesign I've been considering
at the same time--allowing vscreens to be nested inside vscreens and so on.
I'm not sure how to easily do this, though, as Curses isn't very friendly about
allowing overlapping windows.  (what does links do?  Its pulldowns are quite
nice--or maybe I should look into the Curses extension for overlapping
stuff?)

> I really hope someone comes up with a simple selfexplanatory
> intuitive menu-based full-screen interface - it's the #1 thing
> keeping people away from debian.

  I accept patches.  I may stick this on the TODO, but it won't be
high-priority for me; I think the program is quite usable without this feature.
Also, I don't have a lot of time to work on it at the moment and I'd like to
concentrate on other stuff (getting 0.0.7, which I've been talking about
for weeks now, FINALLY released, for example).

  Daniel