On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 10:12:45AM -0500, Kent West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > Damon L. Chesser wrote: > > Sadly, I have NEVER used aptitude ncurses. Ever since the early days of > > Potato, when I tried to use it, I would get completely lost. As smart > > as I am (however smart that is) that interface just does not work the > > way my brain works. I still don't know how to use it and get frustrated > > in 30 seconds trying to use it. Nothing against what I am sure is a > > nice program, it just does not work the way I think. I feel better by > > sharing, it has made us all better people (and dang it! People like > > me!) > > > > Ditto. I'm sure it's a fine program, but I, too, get lost with the > ncurses interface of aptitude. (I actually found dselect easier to get > around in. What?!!)
Believe me, I'm not contemplating a full-on interface redesign for the idle pleasure of it. :-) There are two main things I'm looking at: (a) a big fat menu like dselect's that gives you direct access to the 3-4 functions you normally want to use. (b) making the default way of viewing packages be to do a search and list the results (what's currently called a "limit"). The current interface for finding packages in aptitude was designed to let you peruse the full Debian package list. This was a reasonable idea at the time (I generally did walk through the whole list on a fresh install in 1999) but is kind of silly now. The main thing that people seem to use this list for is the smaller top-level groups (Upgradable / New / etc), and those can be offered directly from the "front page". The GTK+ frontend will probably explore these ideas as well as some other things that I can't replicate in a terminal (having multiple font faces is just an amazing thing, let me tell you). Once we finish with it I'll take a look at how the terminal interface should be updated. Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]