Re: policy on binary/package naming convention
thank you for all of the interesting comments.
what I am getting at is that there should be a simple way for the user
to discover what he or she just installed. "dpkg -L <package name>",
which is a good start, gives you information about installed files,
but the command itself is not easily discoverable (i didn't know about
it, and i've been a Debian user for 1.5 years).
there also isn't an easy way to discover package documentation. yes,
you can "$ cat /usr/share/doc/<package name>/README.Debian". again,
this is not discoverable, and often there isn't good information there
anyway. plus, i'm lazy, and that's a lot of path typing.
maybe what is needed is an option something like "$ dpkg -B foo" or "$
dbrief foo", which would produce a brief output something like:
foo Debian README:
<output of $(cat /usr/share/doc/foo/Debian.README)>
foo upstream README:
<output of $(zcat /usr/share/doc/foo/README.gz)>
foo help:
<maybe the output of $(foo --help)>
foo binaries:
/usr/bin/foo
.
.
.
well, again, "$ dpkg -B" and "$ dbrief" aren't exactly discoverable.
i don't know if any shell commands are really that discoverable.
however, if users were trained (via release documentation) that this
is how to discover new packages, i think it would be very useful.
the above would be useful in synaptic as well as a compliment to
"browse documentation."
more thoughts/ideas?
mike
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