New info needed in packages for user-friendliness
Hi,
To make gnome-apt genuinely easy to use, I think it would be very nice to
have an additional field for the "Common Name" of the application.
Package: mgp
CommonName: MagicPoint
Package: abiword
CommonName: AbiWord
Package: gnome-games
CommonName: GNOME Games
This isn't so useful for something like the libc6 package; I think it's
only needed for "applications," stuff an end user actually cares about. I
don't think the first line of Description really works here; what's needed
is a short package name that doesn't take up too much space but looks a
lot nicer than the traditional cryptic lowercase acronym. In the case of
something like MagicPoint it also makes it quite a bit easier to find what
you're looking for - I've noticed a couple ITP MagicPoint have come up on
debian-devel because even the developers couldn't find this package.
Also, it seems to be common to put the full package name in the first line
of Description, but really that line should have a Description, not the
name of the package. It's a lot nicer when browsing a list of packages.
Which brings up point #2: gnome-apt (aka GNOME Apt :-) should be able to
display only end-user applications. i.e. one should be able to browse only
applications, and have libraries dragged in transparently. There are a few
other issues involved here (like handling the Auto flag to un-drag the
libraries once no apps are using them), but a start is to flag
"interesting to end user" packages somehow. In general this means
libraries vs. apps but there will be exceptions. The "libs" section isn't
good enough here; the X11 section, which we're especially concerned about,
contains all kinds of libraries and other non-app packages.
On to point #3: our categorization is really lame compared to RPMs. The
sections are more a way to organize the FTP site than a way to find
anything. They're too big, too non-specific, and packages can't be in more
than one. So it would be nice to have something like -
Categories: X11, Games, Solitaire, Gnome
which would be a list of user-legible categories the package belongs in.
This lets the user look at all Gnome packages, all X11 packages, all
Solitaire games, etc. - the advantages should be clear. Of course the
possible categories should be maintained in some sort of registry so we
don't get X11, x11, X as different categories. gnome-apt's search feature
will make up for the lack of this to some extent, but not really.
I know this isn't especially hard to implement on the Apt side, but maybe
it's tricky for dpkg. The hard thing is obviously just waiting for all the
maintainers to get around to adding the fields to their package. But, I
think this is important - I imagine Corel will need something similar for
whatever package frontend they intend to implement.
I'd appreciate comments on this and whether it overlaps anything already
in the works. Please, no "ugh, too user friendly" comments; gnome-apt will
let you turn all this off, and I think even the hard-core hackers among us
will appreciate it if things are easier to find. :-) I'm more interested
in feasibility, better ideas, and what political/programming steps are
needed to get moving on whatever we decide.
Thanks,
Havoc
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