Livna Usability Assessment Assessment

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 12:04, kwhiskers wrote:

> 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.

If you use the update function...  If you read 'man yum' you'll see
that there are other operations.

> What if I want to get some new programs that I don't yet have?

yum install packagename

>  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?

yum list
yum search
yum info

These each have options.

> 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.

Try giving 'yum search' a keyword that might be found in the description
as a starting point.  The output may not be pretty but you can capture
it in the usual ways 'yum search video >somefile' or pipe to less where
you can page forwards/backwards or search for additional strings. 
Approaches like these can find something in minutes that can take days
of browsing through even the best-laid-out visuals.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com