On Oct 16, 2007, at 11:26 PM, Alexander Sack wrote:
... My opinion is clearly that we should come up with a decent and standardized way to add third party applications that we can actually _control_ and design in a way that at least gives our users a chance to educate themselves before taking any action.If you just ignore the demand to install third party applications from third party repositories you will likely train our user-base to just google the internet and follow arbitrary instructions they find - which can't be what we want. ...
I think the word "instead" hasn't been used enough in this discussion so far. :-) People want to install third-party software. We can make it easy for them, or we can make it hard for them, but that's attacking the supply side, which is only part of the problem. (Here the labelling of new software as "crack" is an apt analogy.) How should we tackle the demand side? How should we encourage users to use official repositories *instead*?
One way would be to make the tool that provides attractive software listings (currently "Add/Remove Applications") also the only practical way of installing third-party software. This would involve merging gdebi into Add/Remove Applications; merging "Software Sources" into Add/Remove Applications; and making the repository listing something that could not practically be edited using copied-and-pasted terminal commands (e.g. XML rather than space-delimited fields).
That way, any Web site's instructions for installing their software would involve navigating past the Ubuntu Software Library of officially sanctioned software, and we'd have a good chance of attracting people into getting their software from the right sources.
Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
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