[Mageia-dev] RPM features/issues/wishlist

[Donald Stewart]

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.