Re: Benefits (and risks) of using Sid

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 10:12:45AM -0500, Kent West <westk@acu.edu> was heard to say:
> Damon L. Chesser wrote:
> > Sadly, I have NEVER used aptitude ncurses.  Ever since the early days of
> > Potato, when I tried to use it, I would get completely lost.  As smart
> > as I am (however smart that is) that interface just does not work the
> > way my brain works.  I still don't know how to use it and get frustrated
> > in 30 seconds trying to use it.  Nothing against what I am sure is a
> > nice program, it just does not work the way I think.  I feel better by
> > sharing, it has made us all better people (and dang it!  People like
> > me!)
> >   
> 
> Ditto. I'm sure it's a fine program, but I, too, get lost with the
> ncurses interface of aptitude. (I actually found dselect easier to get
> around in. What?!!)

  Believe me, I'm not contemplating a full-on interface redesign for the
idle pleasure of it. :-)

  There are two main things I'm looking at:

    (a) a big fat menu like dselect's that gives you direct access to
        the 3-4 functions you normally want to use.

    (b) making the default way of viewing packages be to do a search and
        list the results (what's currently called a "limit").  The
	current interface for finding packages in aptitude was designed
	to let you peruse the full Debian package list.  This was a
	reasonable idea at the time (I generally did walk through the
	whole list on a fresh install in 1999) but is kind of silly now.
	The main thing that people seem to use this list for is the
	smaller top-level groups (Upgradable / New / etc), and those can
	be offered directly from the "front page".

  The GTK+ frontend will probably explore these ideas as well as some
other things that I can't replicate in a terminal (having multiple font
faces is just an amazing thing, let me tell you).  Once we finish with
it I'll take a look at how the terminal interface should be updated.

  Daniel