On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, Shoshannah Forbes wrote: > > * Dependency hell. Nothing like running a RPM (when you are not > connected to any network) to get dependency errors about missing files. > Or when you are using another machine (with a fast internet connection) > to download RPM's and burn them on a CD- many times you have no way to > know what dependent RPM's you need to download, so you can actually > install the application on the other machine.
apt > I know tools like apt > that help, but they are no good for computers with no internet > connection, and are horrible over dial up. apt-get --recon --download-only install package Will print what you need to download the files required to install "package". This gives you a nice list of URLs to go and fetch. > I hope they improve. (ROX > desktop < http://rox.sourceforge.net/ > addresses this issue with > "application packages" similar to what can be found in mac OSX) Nice, but totally misses the point. Dependencies are here to solve a problem ("I've just installed the program foo and it dosn't work" "can you run it from the terminal?" "terminal? yuck. well, OK. double-click on terminal icon, p-r-o-g-r-a-m-enter. I see something about failing to load a library"). But RPM does not attempt to resolve dependencies. This is a GoodThing: rpm should not be aware of the extra complexity in the existance of a repository (more than one? an up2date server?) of packages and how exactly to decide which of them to install. That is what apt, urpmi and up2date are for. > > * Unless you work with the CLI (and even then sometimes) the file > system is really cryptic. The file system is always very cryptic. On every system. > Where did that RPM install the application? rpmq ? kpackage? rpmdrake? Any information that is available in a command line program can be made avilable to some GUI. In this case such GUIs exist. > Where are my drivers? Where is the application I see an alias to in the > kicker/ launcher/ whatever? The answer is not obvious and takes a lot > of digging to find out. "drivers" are not programs, and need not have menu items. Debian has had a good menuing system for quite a while. This system was later adopted by Mandrake. If a package wants to add itself to the menus, it only needs to create one file and run the menu-updating procedures. This will add it to any programs menu in the system. However it seems that this system is not going to take over: gnome and kde folks decided to have a standard of their own, and it has currently been adopted by (at least) RedHat: http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/menu/draft/menu-spec/menu-spec.html Those files are in an XML format. So you can't easily rem-out lines there with your favorite text editor. > * Not good enough defaults in many applications, combined with too many > configuration options. I have seen how this happens: the developers > can't agree about some design issue, so they end up saying "let's just > make this a pref". > > * In general, too many things *have* to be configured, and configuring > takes a lot of time. Yes, it is fun to tweak here and there, but I use > my machine to get other things done, not to tweak all day. Then configure debconf not to ask you that many questions. > > * Too much of the UI is "legacy UI", which was originally used in > another system to overcome a system limitation, and copied "as is" into > linux, although linux does not have the original limitation at all, and > could have used much better UI. This also leads to cluttered, confusing > and unusable UI's. (see > http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374 Just a comment: I read the article, and don't consider those examples good ones. The worst one is the suggestion to have recently-used lists contain inodes instead of files-names (inode numbers wil be invalidated after the next "save" ;-) ). -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
