[Mageia-dev] RPM features/issues/wishlist

Sat Oct 15 12:22:50 CEST 2011

On 14 October 2011 22:04, Liam R E Quin <liam at holoweb.net> wrote:
+>
+>> The thing about packagekit, well most graphical frontends package
+>> management (pm) is that they dont really need to be that functional.
+>> By that I mean that yes it is great to be able to query nearly all of
+>> urpmi's features in rpmdrake, however, isn't it much faster to just do
+>> urpmf --files file-name.
+>
+>
+> The people most likely to use a graphical program like rpmdrake are
+> probably not so comfortable typing cryptic and distribution-specific
+> shell commands!
+>
+>>  I guess what I am getting at is that as long
+>> as basic functionality, eg searching, add/remove and repo
+>> configurations are handled by the pm and done properly, ie not causing
+>> any breakage, then I feel that it is fair enough to say that more
+>> advanced functions should be done on the cl, firstly because that way
+>> is easier, secondly because that way encourages less breakage from
+>> just point and click and see.
+>
+> The right answer is that point-and-click-and-see should not break
+> things.
+>
+> Years ago I used to recommend Mandrake Linux when I spoke at
+> conferences, and one reason was that the admin tools had a log that
+> showed you what commands were being run, and, if you ran the commands
+> yourself, the same thing would happen. So it was a way for people to
+> learn.
+>
+> Liam
+>
+> --
+> Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
+> Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
+>
+>
+
+That is what I am saying. A frontend should cover every feature that
+is required and can be done sensibly from a gui - without the risk of
+allowing a system to break. I don't care how perfect a gui is, it will
+always increase the risk of something breaking, I am not saying that
+we should remove the option for users to configure things from the
+gui, but before we go and implement advanced features - like the
+orphan feature - we need to make sure that they work properly, both as
+tools and in there communincation, unlike the orphan feature, it did
+break many systems.
+