Re: Misclassification of packages; "libs" and "doc" sections
On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 12:25:48AM -0300, Nicol?s Lichtmaier wrote:
> > Why do we need those lines? When was the last time sections helped YOU?
> > When was the last time they made your life more difficult?
>
> So you propose a big bag of unclassified packages. That would be worse than
> what we have now... I guess that for new users, who go thtough the package
> web pages, or through dselect, or through the ftp sites, sections are
> useful. Or you are in favor of a pure "set of package properties" approach?
> This could go hand in hand with a "canonical" qualification...
>
I can only speak about my own experience and that's rather old now (a bit
more than a year), but when I started using debian I gave dselect a try.
Not long it took and just gave it up and used apt-get instead in conjunction
with the package-webpages at www.at.debian.org to search for the appropriate
packages.
What I want to point out with this is that there is never ever the chance
to guess what's good for a new user before a new user tested it. I mean what
we are all talking about is a UI for dpkg/apt and NOTHING will prevent us
from going the classic way. That is to make a design, make a prototype and
then make a field-study (one-new-user-testing?) if our design fits. After
fetching all data together we will be able to jugde if our new approach is
better or not. Then the overall process starts again (making prototype). At
some point we would break out and have a nice design for the UI.
I know that this suggestions might not easy to be covered, but before we
start a flame here (it rather seems that it already started), we should
think about a way of doing the proper design. When we do so, users will
show us the right way, at least I am hoping so. Nevertheless ideas have to
be made like hierachical package-sections, etc.
--
kind regards,
Michael Moerz
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