Re: Annoyances of aptitude (Was: Where are we now?) (Was: Bits from the RM)

[Daniel Burrows <dnb114@psu.edu>]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 09:53:33AM -0500, Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net> was heard to say:
> On 02-Oct-03, 21:59 (CDT), Daniel Burrows <dnb114@psu.edu> wrote: 
> > > The Users Manual starts with a section on the non-interactive interface.
> > > Huh?
> > 
> >   I suppose the command-line interface could be documented later, but
> > it's usually documented earlier.  Or are you objecting to the odd phrase
> > "non-interactive interface"? 
> 
> I think his point is that if one is in the "interactive interface", and
> uses the the menu to view the User's Manual, one is probably not too
> interested in the command line options. :-) The command line options
> should probably be left out of the text displayed in the interactive
> environment, or moved to the end.

  I see.  It's a lot simpler, from the point of view of maintainability,
to have a single user's manual for both offline and online perusal.

  One nice way to make this less of an issue would be to rewrite the
documentation in a structured format (eg, texinfo or docbook) and add a
reader for that format to aptitude.  Unfortunately, writing the reader
could be a lot of work.

> >   There's task information in the database, but no mapping to
> > "human-readable" names.  Would you prefer that tasks be hidden entirely?
> 
> Yeah, if you can't properly support tasks, there's no point in
> displaying that section.

  I guess it depends what you mean by "properly support" -- the packages
are all there, sorted into categories; all that's missing is the ability
to, eg, display "Development/C++" instead of devel-c++ (or whatever),
and the long descriptions of the tasks.

> > [ Get menu with ESC or Ctrl-<space> ]
> 
> ESC doesn't work for me, either on the console or in rxvt.

  Oops, I guess it doesn't.  Apparently I was misthinking.

  Daniel

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