[Synaptic-devel] Re: Improved apt frontend - package manager (all apt developers shoud colaborate !!!)

[Michael Vogt]

On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 02:17:56PM +0200, Mantas Kriau?i?nas wrote:
> Hi,
Hi,
 
sorry for answering this email so late. It slipped through my radar
somehow.

> >In what respect to you think synaptic is harder for beginners (compared to
> >red-carpet or stormpkg)? I'm working in on a new gui for synaptic
> >right now, so suggestions are welcome. Some screenshots are available
> >at: 
> Stormpkg is easier to use, because there are easy accesible possibilities to
> filter packages by decriptions.
> Beginners don't know packages names and if beginner want to install some
> program (for example video player) he writes "video player" into package
> description filter. Synaptic should have easy acessible possibility to 
> filter or search packages by decriptions like stormpkg.

Thanks for this suggestion. I'll add something like this in the near
future. 

> Also with stormpkg is easier to install recommended or suggested packages 
> and also easily sort packages by name/install status/size/etc by clicking 
> on headers of package tree table.

For #1, I don't know about it, but I'll have a look. For #2 this
sounds like a good idea. I'll have to think about when it makes sense
though. Something like install status should be done via a filter
IMHO. But sorting for size sounds resonable. I'll see what I can do.

> Red-carpet package manager is very user friendly and also has wonderfull
> feature - with red-carpet you can install local packages (and dependencies
> are automatically installed from internet). In command line you
> can do this with these commands (if deb_package has pre-depens installed):
> 
> dpkg -i deb_package
> apt-get -f install
> 
> more about this you can read here:
> 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=47379
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=88616
> 
> Maybe  somebody could implement this feature in synaptic and after testing 
> this feature could be implemented in apt too ?

Thanks. Well, this sound like it's not easy to implement. Changing apt
is not exactly my area of expertise. But maybe Gustavo can comment on
this? It sounds like a very usefull feature to me. 

> P.S. Why debian has more than 5 partially working apt frontends: stormpkg,
> synaptic, deity and deity-gtk (very good, but pretty unstable apt frontend,
> currently with no maintainer :( - see http://bugs.debian.org/deity),
> captain, gnome-apt, aptitude and no one stable and full-featured ? Maybe
> it's time to colaborate ? Synaptic, deity-gtk and gnome-apt are based on
> gtk, maybe synaptic and gnome-apt developers can colaborate and improve one
> program ?

I can't really say why we have so many. It's maybe a matter of
taste. The central paradigma of synaptic are the package filters. I
really like this and find it very convenient. Personally, I find
stormpkg not very easy to use in many ways. gnome-apt is nice and
Filip Van Raemdonck and I are in contact and we are sharing code and
ideas. But merging gnome-apt and synaptic will fail on the simple
fact that synaptic is C++ and gnome-apt is C. Beside that, synaptic is
AFAIK to only apt frontend that works on apt RPM systems as well (but
I don't know this for sure).

thanks for your suggestions,
 Michael

-- 
"Computers are not intelligent.  They only think they are."
        -- Martin Schulze