Hi, To make gnome-apt genuinely easy to use, I think it would be very nice to have an additional field for the "Common Name" of the application.
Package: mgp CommonName: MagicPoint Package: abiword CommonName: AbiWord Package: gnome-games CommonName: GNOME Games This isn't so useful for something like the libc6 package; I think it's only needed for "applications," stuff an end user actually cares about. I don't think the first line of Description really works here; what's needed is a short package name that doesn't take up too much space but looks a lot nicer than the traditional cryptic lowercase acronym. In the case of something like MagicPoint it also makes it quite a bit easier to find what you're looking for - I've noticed a couple ITP MagicPoint have come up on debian-devel because even the developers couldn't find this package. Also, it seems to be common to put the full package name in the first line of Description, but really that line should have a Description, not the name of the package. It's a lot nicer when browsing a list of packages. Which brings up point #2: gnome-apt (aka GNOME Apt :-) should be able to display only end-user applications. i.e. one should be able to browse only applications, and have libraries dragged in transparently. There are a few other issues involved here (like handling the Auto flag to un-drag the libraries once no apps are using them), but a start is to flag "interesting to end user" packages somehow. In general this means libraries vs. apps but there will be exceptions. The "libs" section isn't good enough here; the X11 section, which we're especially concerned about, contains all kinds of libraries and other non-app packages. On to point #3: our categorization is really lame compared to RPMs. The sections are more a way to organize the FTP site than a way to find anything. They're too big, too non-specific, and packages can't be in more than one. So it would be nice to have something like - Categories: X11, Games, Solitaire, Gnome which would be a list of user-legible categories the package belongs in. This lets the user look at all Gnome packages, all X11 packages, all Solitaire games, etc. - the advantages should be clear. Of course the possible categories should be maintained in some sort of registry so we don't get X11, x11, X as different categories. gnome-apt's search feature will make up for the lack of this to some extent, but not really. I know this isn't especially hard to implement on the Apt side, but maybe it's tricky for dpkg. The hard thing is obviously just waiting for all the maintainers to get around to adding the fields to their package. But, I think this is important - I imagine Corel will need something similar for whatever package frontend they intend to implement. I'd appreciate comments on this and whether it overlaps anything already in the works. Please, no "ugh, too user friendly" comments; gnome-apt will let you turn all this off, and I think even the hard-core hackers among us will appreciate it if things are easier to find. :-) I'm more interested in feasibility, better ideas, and what political/programming steps are needed to get moving on whatever we decide. Thanks, Havoc
