Linux and application installing

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 09:11 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 17:27 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > On 09/07/2010 05:16 PM, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > > Linux has traditionally shown the user packages to update and install,
> > > which is great for administrators, but sucks hard for end users. How
> > > many times have you been prompted with an update list that asks you to
> > > decide whether to update something you have no idea about[1]?
> > >
> > > Mo illustrated[2] a few days ago about how confusing the updater is
> > > and I agree with her; and it's mostly my fault. Lists of unlocalized
> > > generic packages are so 1990's, and compared with the Ubuntu Software
> > > Center or the Android App-store we look like amateurs.
> > 
> > Thoughts on making the software center less distro specific?  Couldn't
> > the UI be grafted on top of the PK api?
> 
> okay - I'll bite - why do we want to make it less distro-specific? What
> does it get us? It means we have to deal with a bunch of
> Lowest-common-denominator issues and it means a looser coupling of the
> tools we have.
> 
> It is legit to write tools for fedora that are FOR fedora. Why not do
> that? 

Because sharing infrastructure and tools is raising the lowest common
denominator and benefits everybody ? Common good, etc...

That being said, yes, doing things in less distro-specific ways does
involve compromise, and I'm not very optimistic about getting any of
that for the software center...