[olpc-software] Package manager stuff

[Mike Hearn]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 19:17 -0500, Jim Gettys wrote:
> Gnome-application-manager seems to be a much better UI to finding end
> user programs.  So while I may sometimes run Synaptic on my Ubuntu
> system (it is useful for searching for items that I don't know exist at
> times), it isn't the UI that is offered to naive users these days.

Better than Synaptic definitely, but Synaptic is very poor so that's not
saying much. The question is, is it better than Google?

Personally I usually want to read a bit about a program before trying it
out (unless it's something like a game), see the documentation or
screenshots, try and get a feel for how popular it is, find out if it
has the features I need etc. Usually this info is best found on the web.

I have two other issues with g-a-m as an idea:

* It's oriented around the idea of repositories. The OLPC wiki page 
  explicitly says it's not Fedora, but based upon it ... given the
  user community will mostly be non-UNIX gurus where is this repository
  going to come from?

* The idea that it's possible to put an entry for every interesting
  application in the world into an enormous tree view just seems somehow
  wrong to me, there's too much of it :)

thanks -mike