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Re: Gnome-apt hmm



On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Adam Heath wrote:
> 
> Hmm.  What is this about connecting to some server at a high(35091) port?
>

I believe that is CORBA, it is not gnome-apt directly. Don't worry about
it.
 
> Also(and this is towards Jason mostly), there NEEDS to be a way to show what
> new packages are available since the last time gnome-apt was run, aka dselect
> like.  This is a much used feature.  I usually only go into dselect nowadays
> to see what new pkgs are available.  Maybe gnome-apt could make a copy of the
> binary database each time it is run, and compare it between invocations.
> 

Yep, Jason's department.

> Doubling clicking on a + to open a folder?  That is not how it is in other
> progs.  Double-clicking on a folder, is fine.  But it should only require a
> single click on a +.  Also, the double-click speed is difficult to master.
> 

Good point. I had that as a quick hack and then got used to it.

> Some vertical divider lines in the package list would be nice.
> 

This is very easy but might be cluttered, don't you think? Anyway it can
be an option, sure.

> The default view-group-alphabetical has to change.  It sucks.  I had no idea
> what the tree list was showing me at first.
> 

Which of the groupings do you think should be default? I always use alpha,
so ... there's my rationale. ;-)

> You can do package-details, and bring up a separate window, but the same info
> is still in the main window.  Confusing.
> 

This is a feature. :-) Turn one of them off. (Don't you think it would be
annoying if choosing Details... automatically yanked the details out of
the main window?) I just don't know what else to do really...

> If the details window is detachable, so should the package list window.
> 

You can get this effect by popping Details and hiding the details in the
main window... right?

> The text wrap for descriptions should NOT break apart words.  When I selected
> econfigedit, it wrapped at mod ule.
> 

If you mean the long description (in the text box at the bottom), this is
Gtk, you should file a bug on Gtk for this. However I can already tell you
their standard response: "the text widget sucks and we are rewriting it
for 1.4 so just deal until then." 

> In the details window, Related, Special, and Other are blank.  Is this
> intended?
> 

It's not finished. It's unclear what will go there, suggestions welcome. 

> You have the columns DKI, yet the right-click menu calls them Install/Upgrade,
> Remove, Keep, in that order.
>

Reordering is a good idea. 
 
> What is the point of import and export package list?  Is this for packages.gz?
> If so, that should be called update list of packages, which then calls apt-get
> update.
> 

No those are different but have no functionality right now. Wichert is the
only one that really knows what they are for. ;-)

> If File-sources, it has the drop-down menu for stable/unstable before the
> server menu.  This doesn't coincide with the way the uri is formed.  It would
> be nice if gnome-apt could fetch www.debian.org/~jgg/Mirrors(this needs to be
> out of Jason's home dir, btw), and parse that into options that could be
> selected from the menus.  And as always, allow for non-listed entries.  Why is
> so much space given to the section in the scroll window?  The distribution and
> section are the smallest parts, yet the section is given the bulk of the
> width.
> 

Good ideas, that dialog is on the back burner until Jason writes the code
to edit sources.list though.

> In Preferences, column-order, there is no way to turn off a particular column.
> 

It's in the View menu; might be nice to add toggles here too, sure. It
would be complicated though, because the dialog is not modal so any
changes via menu would have to propagate to the dialog as well as vice
versa.

> To the left of the file menu, on the menu bar, is a slim vertical block that
> does nothing but waste space.
>

It is to tear off the menu bar (or move the menu bar to the bottom of the
window, most useless feature of all time). You can turn this off in the
Gnome Control Center, it's a Gnome-wide setting.
 
> Muwahaha.  I have 256m, and hardly use x, so this isn't a problem, for me.
> But 4 megs is WAY to much.
> 

[insert my earlier comment here]

Seriously the 4 megs includes:

Sound playing.
Sound file formats.
Image displaying.
Image file formats.
CORBA 
A general C utility library
A GUI toolkit 
libstdc++ and the STL
all of Apt's functionality
Themes
reading/parsing config files (twice over, libapt-pkg and libgnome)

If you want functionality it takes up some space. If you are in the "I
don't need all this crap just give me vi" school, don't use gnome-apt. 

Serious suggestions for reducing the Gnome library size are welcome, but
the point of Gnome is functionality that is not traditionally provided in
Unix, so saying "don't have all that stuff" is basically the same as
saying you don't want a desktop environment.

gnome-apt is not even close to using all the stuff in those libraries, so
a good bit of each one should remain on the disk.

Thanks,
Havoc



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