Desktop issues discussion proposal

[Havoc Pennington]

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 09:43, Gene C. wrote:
> 
> Should kdenetwork be split so kmail is not included but instead moved to 
> Extras?  This has to be a management nightmare.
> 

For end-user apps (i.e. those in the menus), it will almost always be
desirable to maintain a 1 .desktop file to 1 RPM mapping. And in fact we
should be syncing the name of the package displayed in the package tool
(including translations) with the .desktop file name. Or even making
package management happen in terms of .desktop files. From a single-user
standpoint, "menu editing" (at least in terms of add/remove items) and
"package management" really have no reason to be different.

The ideal user experience might be to effectively refcount each RPM by
the number of users that have it in their menus, and when nobody has the
item in their menus the package gets removed. And similarly you'd
install a package by choosing what items to add to your menus. Unclear
if there's a sane way to implement this, but this is a nice way for a
desktop user to see things.

Obviously it only works for desktop-app type of packages. You need
another approach to deal with servers, though you could perhaps imagine
a similar approach (when you enable the service, it automatically gets
the required packages and punches the firewall to make the service go).

Also, even if package add/remove were combined with menu editing, you
still need an "update" or "get patches" kind of UI... though judging by
the number of Windows viruses out there, perhaps the default should be
to run this thing automatically every night unless the user opts out ;-)

Anyway, we really should think about the issue much more broadly and not
assume that the task at hand is "write a single tool that does package
management." How can we get it smoothly integrated into the desktop?
Maybe there are multiple tools for different tasks or kinds of user.

There are related problems too, such as making it really easy for third
parties to provide a set of RPMs with comps file on a CD or in an http
directory, and handle that really nicely with an install wizard.

Just some brainstorm ideas. Let's start with what the user should see
though, and then figure out how to implement our closest approximation.

Havoc