Ramblings and questions regarding Fedora, but stemming from gnome-software and desktop environments

[Bill Nottingham]

Andrew Lutomirski (luto at mit.edu) said: 
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 10:36 AM, Miloslav Trmač <mitr at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> While I think you are right in some cases like cashier, isn't this
> >> discussion really about the Fedora Workstation?! Since for this the
> >> target user is a developer, can we just agree that in this case the user
> >> needs both CLI and GUI apps (although some developers certainly sticks
> >> to one of them).
> >
> > The gist is that
> > * Nobody _should_ need to use a terminal: non-developers¹ don’t need it, and developers deserve a better environment.  It’s “only” a matter of writing lots of new software.  AFAICT Workstation would in some ideal future want to get to this state.  (And non-Linux operating systems are getting closer and closer to this ideal over time.)
> 
> Having watched people develop under Mac OS X, they have really shiny
> things to play with.  Xcode is pretty, and there are whole pile of
> nice editors and such to use.  Heck, even Firefox and Chromium are
> gradually turning into developer tools as opposed to just being
> browsers and debuggers.
> 
> Nonetheless, the productive Mac OS X developers I know all have
> something like an entire desktop devoted to just running terminals.
> 
> Given that no one, on any OS I've ever seen*, has come up with
> something better than a terminal for running scripts, watching log
> messages scroll by, using fancy shell commands, etc., I think that
> expecting Fedora to magically solve all these problems is both overly
> optimistic and is an entirely inappropriate assumption to base the OS
> design on.

I'm not sure that GNOME Software is the right place to solve this, though -
if I'm using the terminal to build things:

- I shouldn't be searching for grep/sed/awk - those are part of the base
  operating system, and should be treated as such.
- I shouldn't be searching for gcc, gcc-c++, make, etc. as separate
  promoted to GNOME Software applications; those should be treated as part
  of a development kit that's installed and updated as a unit, any more than
  I should be searching for libgweather or libdrm as part of installing a
  desktop app.
- Even searching for -devel packages implies a "target == host" build
  sensibility that is relevant mostly to those developing Fedora, and
  not to most of those developers that I run into on a day-to-day basis
  (and likely not the developers we're targeting.) They're interested
  in using mock along with system libraries for RHEL/CentOS, using
  pip/npm/rubygems, etc. 

Bill