On Fri, 2014-02-14 at 13:02 -0500, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
On 01/28/2014 03:12 PM, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On 28 January 2014 18:43, Przemek Klosowski <przemek.klosowski(a)nist.gov>
wrote:
> > There are two separate issues here: 'abandonment', and
'GUIness'. As to the
> > latter, I think it's a mistake to have a primary application installation
> > tool that only deals with GUI apps, because it relegates text-based tools,
> > such as 'units', to a second-class status of being hard to find and to
> > install.
> That's not the tool we've designed and built. We've built a GUI
> application installer, not a package installer.
[sorry fo the delayed answer---I got wrapped up and had this draft
sitting open for two weeks]
While it's not the fault of the installer, I am concerned about that
distinction. For better or worse, a lot of useful tools seem to be out
of scope for a 'GUI application installer'. GCC, perl, git, octave, R,
units, mysql/sqlite3, this kind of thing. It doesn't even make sense
to shoehorn them into GUI app world by embedding them in terminals,
because their natural environment is command-line interaction.
The emphasis on GUI is great, but it should enhance rather than
deprecate the old-style interactive command model that arguably is the
core idea in Unix. Your tool, while improving the GUI app experience,
could also support non GUI software---or at least not completely
ignore its existence. I do get it that there is a class of GUI users
that need to see a window with buttons and help, and non-GUI apps
simply baffle them with a blinking command prompt, at best. OTOH, I
believe there should be a setting in the installer about that, "do not
show me commandline software". I believe that it should be off by
default, but maybe I am wrong about that.
Do you really think it's impossible?
Do you actually want to use a tool like Software to install gcc?
I just can't see why you would. You know gcc is what you want. You don't
need a shiny description and some screenshots and user reviews on a 1-5
star scale. 'yum install gcc' seems a massively better fit. Who would it
benefit to have something like gcc in Software?
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net