On 02/19/2014 01:16 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:

On Sun, 2014-02-16 at 14:38 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:

On 14 February 2014 21:43, Przemek Klosowski <przemek.klosowski@nist.gov> wrote:

If we are providing a next-generation UI for installing, to replace yum

That's not what we're doing.

To expand a bit: insofar as Software - the tool we're discussing here,
and the tool to which the "require applications to ship appdata"
requirement applies - replaces anything, it replaces gnome-packagekit.
It is not replacing yum.

The old gnome-packagekit was a 'graphical package installer', just like
yumex and apper. The new gnome-software is (with a bit of a handwave) an
'application installer'. That's a difference, but it's not relevant to
yum at all, and I doubt many people used gpk to install gcc. For those
who really want a GUI package installer, the old gpk is still available
in a not-installed-by-default package (though I assume Richard will
eventually drop it), and yumex is always an option.

Thanks for the context. The reason I keep on droning about it is well explained by the old military saying "What is worse than a bad general? Two good generals.". I.e., it would be nice if there was one go-to application for GUI software installation that everyone uses and improves. As it is, we have four: yumex, gpk, apper and now Richard's, and every one has some unique nice and/or niche features (*). It's just a better user experience when there's one GUI installer with simple default choice and advanced options, rather than having to explain that if you're installing development tools, use this, else if you're installing graphics apps, use that, else if you're installing commandline tools use the other thing.

Speaking for myself, I use yum all the time, but I do find GUIs useful, for instance when I remember that there's a useful structural chemistry app called A--something... angstrom? asteroid? haemoroid? ahh, Avogadro!!!. Just happened to me recently. It's much easier to find it in a GUI browser.

I feel I said everything that I can say about this, so I will sit down and be quiet now.

Greetings

p

(*) I never really used apper, and when I just brought it up, I liked its broad selection of filters (free/nonfree, native, developer/end user, commandline/graphical, etc). They turn out to be more useful than I expected them to be---for instance the non-free filter surprised me by when I looked at OpenCASCADE---I didn't realize it came from rpmfusion-nonfree (this is actually changing as we speak, its license was just changed and a large body of software including FreeCAD, and other sci/eng visualization stuff is moving to the mainline Fedora repo).