I would have to agree with Graham's point. If the whole application manager apt-get dists debian system is going to be so brittle that the only SAFE way to get an application on to your system is with Application Manager in blue-pill mode, then there should be a user/cli category or something.
Having something that is otherwise useless without doing CLI interaction is different than something that is specifically useful on the CLI itself. If I port Kismet, it might automatically open an Xterm from a script, but it will run in text mode until a GTK frontend or something else is done. And some things are diagnostic that you want to be available for when something does go wrong. You can't possibly build everything into the apps or add enough things on. The problem is that INVISIBLE EQUALS UNINSTALLABLE and VISIBLE EQUALS USER/* as far as the Application manager is concerned. Well, not quite, but I can't create an X.install file or anything else except an isolated .deb if it is not in user/* Since there is no clean way of doing this, either user/whatever gets cluttered up with a bunch of things simply to make them safely installable, or everyone uses apt-get, dpkg, or red-pill mode and breaks their tablets, or you create junk meta-packages that install a very short doc file but "depend" on the real file solely for the purpose of pulling that file in. Right now all three manners of ugliness are being used, and I think there have been enough pleas to get it fixed. The worst possible outcome is for whatever reorganization, refactoring, etc. to happen and yet we will still be stuck with all three hacks after it was supposedly fixed. Call it user/advanced, user/powertools, user/dangerous or whatever, or create a second major category to make things visible and safely installable, poweruser/*, etc. or something. Let them be disabled by default like Extras is now, but so that it can be turned on. On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Graham Cobb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Saturday 08 November 2008 08:56:28 Andrew Flegg wrote: >> No, it's not wagging the dog. If a user needs to open a terminal, >> create a configuration file and run something from the command line; I >> *strongly* believe it's outside the scope of the Application Manager. >> >> Since there's a requirement to use the terminal to configure it, it is >> no extra step to require the user to use apt-get to install it. > > I see your point but I don't quite agree. Xterm is a standard part of the > tablet and I think command line utilities have a place in AppMgr. An obvious > example is ssh! And possibly most of the applications which will go into the > developer tools category. > > I don't think we really want to be encouraging people to use apt-get, > particularly while "apt-get upgrade" can break your system. > > But I do think that there should be a category specifically for command line > tools so that people who do not use the command line don't have to waste time > on them. And I also agree that a GUI configuration dialogue for a system > tool is much better than expecting someone to edit a config file. > > Graham > _______________________________________________ > maemo-developers mailing list > maemo-developers@maemo.org > https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers > _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
