On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 6:08 PM, Lars Seipel <lars.seipel@gmail.com> wrote:
When you don't know the name of the thing you want (or, even, if
something like it exists at all) it gets messy, though. Say I need some
program to convert weird document format X into PDFs or do some other
random task. As searching and browsing available programs with yum is
not a particularly pleasant activity I go for Gnome Software.
I search online to figure out the name of said app first and then search for it on the system. Especially for the PDF conversion case because there are *so* many utilities for that sort of thing but each only does a few niche things well. Even if each one had a profile in GNOME software, it's not going to have all the little nitty gritty details I'd be better served with from an in-depth blog post or forum post or whatever about in. (I say this having had to do many apparently rather freaky conversions esp. with PDF and EPS and color spaces over the years, thanks vendor friends.)Using it is a nice experience but it doesn't get me any results for my
search. I think 'aww crap, no tool for me in the repos' although there
are two perfectly fine command-line programs in Fedora I'd be happy to
know about.
I do think it'd be nice to have command-line programs for PDF conversion in GNOME software - being a biased designer that occasionally does print work who needs these tools. To be fair, PDF conversion is a bit of a mess in the FLOSS world and I think we'd benefit from having one (or less than 20, anyway) comprehensive tool for working with PDFs and performing the sorts of tasks useful for people needing to wrangle them.
I think that the above, though, is a bit different than having say python-babel in GNOME software.
People on this list might know they have to search for "packages" when
there're no "applications" available. That's not true for everyone. My
anecdotal experience from helping out fellow students suggests it's a
common issue. They need a C compiler, bison and make to do assignments
and it just doesn't show up in Ubuntu's software center (at least it
didn't then, maybe they changed that). They don't know what to do and
ask someone with more experience. Well, sometimes at least. The other
(at least as common) option is to start googling and then paste random
commands from some website into a root shell.
This is a good case for using DevAssistant. And the professors aren't telling them what to install to get their assignments done? (?!) Do they not have lab sessions where part of the first class is spent configuring their laptops to complete assignments? Even some of my 400-level comp sci classes had environment configuration stuff in the first lecture.
I agree with you that dumping gigantic lists of packages on the screen
isn't a solution. But just dismissing the problem as "it's for
applications only" isn't that great, either. Not when most users
probably think of "applications" as being the same thing as programs in
general.
I think a couple of things are being conflated:
- GUI app vs command line app
- App vs non-app (e.g. library, codec, driver, etc.)
I'm with you on the first one - I think more command line apps should be included. However, I'm not so sure that something like GCC counts as a 'command line app.' (I mean, kinda sorta, but not really!) Even when doing C development on my system, I have never installed the gcc package specifically - I use the development package group. For a lot of libraries needs to compile an app, I also don't typically install the packages one-by-one, I do yum-builddep. I think DevAssistant has an option similar to yum-builddep. I also think it does a bit better than installing the development package group, because it's a bit more granular and you can pick particular languages and frameworks of focus and not install everything that could be used for development.
~m