Livna Usability Assessment Assessment

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 11:04 -0700, kwhiskers wrote:
> 
> 
> On 16/11/05, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at redhat.com> wrote:
>         >I think up2date is still exerting a confusing influence over
>         people new
>         >to Fedora.  Hopefully soon enough something with a similar UI
>         based on
>         >"yum inside" will replace it and the Add/Remove packages app
>         and the 
>         >confusion will go away.
> 
> I use yum, plus occasionally, I will use straight rpm. This works fine
> for me.
> 
> One SUPREME drawback I have found to all of the package managers like
> yum, synaptic and up2date is that they only update the programs you
> have on your system.
> 
> What if I want to get some new programs that I don't yet have? There
> are 1000s of programs on the official fedora discs and on extras, but
> there is no way for me to know what they are, so how could I know
> whether I want to install them, or even know that they exist, unless I
> scan the list?
> 
> I have spent hours scanning the directories, manually typing rpm -qip
> package.rpm for HUNDREDS of files, just to find out more and get a
> COUPLE of nice gems. At least KPackage lets you have some information
> about a program, but still, you need to look at each and every one.
> 
> Even what freshrpms and rpmforge do, giving a one-line description
> (very inadequate, but better than nothing) helps a LOT.

For a view of what's in Fedora Extras, try here:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/

This is generated using a tool called "repoview" (which of course is
available in Extras) and is derived from the metadata used by yum. So in
theory you can use yum queries to search for the information contained
there. Any repo could create a view like this very easily using the
repoview tool.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>