Re: HowToInstallPackages (was Re: aims of the wiki?)
(replying to both the parent and grandparent message)
On Thu, Aug 21, 2025 at 10:19:07AM +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Wed Aug 20, 2025 at 4:27 PM BST, Andrew Sayers wrote:
[...]
> > * [[AptProtocol]] is supported by Ubuntu, but not Debian
> >
> > (do we know why it's not supported? It would make this whole problem go away)
>
> I'm not sure, and it's a shame AptProtocol doesn't tell us more!
Looks like it was ignored in favour of aptlinex[0],
which was abandoned upstream and dropped three years later[1].
So probably just that nobody thought to re-evaluate it?
Clicking on the apt:packageexample link at [2] in Firefox does nothing but
print a warning in the console:
Prevented navigation to “apt:packageexample” due to an unknown protocol.
Chromium asks if I want to pass the URL to xdg-open, then does nothing
when I click "Open xdg-open".
If `apturl` is rejected or doesn't fix those problems, a quick search suggests
this might be doable just by recognfiguring individual browsers[3][4].
I think this is very much worth doing, but like the issue of a default
graphical installer, it's not a wiki thing. More importantly, it looks like
it will need more inter-Debian teamwork than I know how to help with.
> I've started https://wiki.debian.org/HowToInstallPackages
Now this is a problem I can help with :)
I've added a bit to that page. While writing it, I realised it's really a page
for people on day one of Linux, who are overwhelmed by everything.
In particular, a user who managed to install Debian without installing synaptic
will need a lot of hand-holding. So I agree it should be laser-focussed, and
further it should spell things out in a level of detail that would be kinda
insulting on most pages (like putting "press enter" as its own list item).
Aside - I think this page shouldn't mention `aptitude`. It's not a proper GUI
so can't replace synaptic, and not installed by default, so can't replace apt.
I haven't really looked through the package-management pages before,
but will try to find time over the weekend to see where we might link to
for questions like dependencies, repositories etc.
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg00007.html
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=652457
[2] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptURL
[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22729686/set-custom-protocol-handler-in-firefox
[4] https://htyp.org/xdg-open/how_to/add_custom_protocol
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