Feature Proposal: Use cases database

Richard Hughes hughsient at gmail.com
Thu Sep 11 14:04:50 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 15:38 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Replace digital-photo forum with foo community and you'll get pretty
> much the same results

You're not meant to have one catalog file for all of that. You could
just have a file called "Gallery integration.catalog" -- it's not comps
where one file has to describe subsets.

> > [PackageKit Catalog]
> > InstallPackages=gnome-do
> 
> This is so trivial it presents almost no interest at all. If you want
> to go mono-app please consider eclipse, openoffice or firefox and
> their gazillon of plugins and extensions.

get hacking on packagekit.catalog:

[PackageKit Catalog]
# Common packages
InstallPackages=autoconf;automake;intltool;libtool;pkgconfig
# Fedora
InstallPackages(fedora)=glib2-devel;gvfs-devel;dbus-glib-devel;NetworkManager-glib-devel;PolicyKit-devel;
# Pardus
InstallPackages(pardus)=NetworkManager-devel;PolicyKit-devel;autoconf;automake;dbus-devel;dbus-glib-devel;docbook-to-man;gettext-devel;glib2-devel;gtk-doc;poldek-devel;python-devel;readline-devel;rpm-pythonprov;sqlite3-devel
# Forsight
InstallPackages(forsight)=gnome-development;dbus-development

> Well that's not the syntax on your own web page (misses ;) so we've
> answered the question of your format being simple enough to be typed
> by memory without validation

You can use either delimiter, no package names have spaces in them. I
guess it might even make sense to add ',' to the delimiter list too.

> What they do want is to click on a link, get the list of A, B and C,
> and uncheck the apps targetting stuff they're not interested in.

They won't know what most of the applications are. Also, applications !=
packages, so you have to be a bit more wise than just knowing the
application name.

> Wrong, anyone not sitting on a fiber to his home.

I sit on a low speed broadband connection. I don't think I can even get
fiber in my road, regardless, I don't spend much time installing new
applications.

> Think your openoffice user is going to appreciate downloading megs of
> optionnal openoffice stuff just in case?

I don't think it matters if people install 45Mb rather than 33Mb --
downloading 45Mb takes me about 10 minutes, so I just let it install in
the background or go and get a cup of tea. Bandwidth and disk space are
cheap. If you're that low on either, then catalogs are not suitable for
your use case.

> Think your latex man is interested in installing megs of fonts for
> languages he does not type? (how do you decide beforehand which
> language a latex user will want to type)

You don't, you patch the latex program to install it's own font when
it's first used in a document (trivial). Let the computer do all the
hard work, and let the latex man get on with writing latex rather than
working out which font face should be downloaded.

> Will the music junkie be interested in dvd playback and authoring
> tools (just because the average teenager does both music and video)?

I don't see the logic. Catalog files are fine grained -- it's okay to
download 5 catalog files and execute then all at once --
gpk-install-catalog is smart enough to combine them into one set of
changes.

> Presets are fine. Inflexible presets lead to resource waste and menu
> clutter users do complain of.

More people complain that Linux is "hard to use" than complain they have
useless packages on their disk. I can say that, as I've asked a number
real users (not developers). For instance, my mum doesn't care there are
icons in the menu she doesn't use, but she does care when there isn't
any clipart installed.

Not all user of Linux have hours to waste making the perfect streamlined
setup, most use the computer to actually get something done.

Richard.





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