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

[Alec Leamas]

On 31/12/14 16:25, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On 30 December 2014 at 23:31, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>> b.) Would it be helpful, friendlier, and better emphasize the special
>> focus, if these group install items mentioned above were exposed in
>> GNOME Software with an appropriate icon?
>
> We could do this right now, although I don't think "expose the entire
> comps tree" makes a lot of sense.

Here is also questions whether this is the right thing to do, I guess 
many packages, notably -devel ones, doesn't belong to a group. How 
should these then be handled?

And from a user perspective, if you already *know* that you need to 
install e.g., gcc  or foo-devel first finding the proper group to 
install seems a bit awkward.

Perhaps this path also might create pressure to include all sorts of 
things into the groups, a "misuse" of the groups feature?

[cut]

> Installing a compiler is something that *something*
> needs to handle, I'm just not sure if that should be gnome-software
> itself or something that *uses* gnome-software to do the correct thing
> and to handle updates.

Here is a some common ground, indeed. Seems that we agree on that 
installing CLI stuff is something that should be handled in a 
developer-oriented workstation (not that you have said something else, 
but some others).

Now, in my mind installing/updating non-GUI software is not a 
corner-case for a developer - it's probably the most common installation 
done even when working with GUI tools. Because even so you need tools 
such as compilers but also libraries/-devel packages. And often lot's of 
them.

 From this perspective, I guess that if gnome-software (g-s) upstream 
defines installing CLI stuff as something which should be handled by 
"something else", I cannot really see the point handling updates in g-s. 
Rather, g-s would then become a nice add-on to browse and install GUI 
applications.

In the end, isn't this one hand about if gnome-software's upstream is 
willing to undertake the work to adapt also to the developer usecase? 
And on the other, which tool the workstation group should use for 
graphical software installations? Because as of now, gnome-software just 
doesn't fit the workstation bill?

Cheers!

--alec