[Mageia-discuss] Package management system

[Michael Scherer]

Le mercredi 29 septembre 2010 à 17:52 +0800, Kira a écrit :
> 在 Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:44:37 +0800, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org>寫道:
> > I have worked on it a little on it, to complete it, and the patches were
> > accepted upstream. According to
> > http://www.packagekit.org/pk-matrix.html , the only important part we
> > miss are :
> > InstallFiles and WhatProvides , which may not be too hard to code.
> >
> But, do we need packagekit? I don't get it.

Packagekit integration in gnome ( like "install gstreamer plugin when
needed to play a file" or "install on demand file when i type the
command" ) is nice, and IMHO, would solve some issue we tried to solve
with Suggests. 

> ----
> By the way, I think smart should win back some attention, since some
> good function is missed in rpmdrake.
>
> Maybe include it like the way canonical did(Two package management,
> one for newbie and one for expert?)

Usability experts will tell you that it is bad. Because people are not
able to fully judge what they need exactly solely based on the name, and
they have 2 systems to learn instead of one before choosing. 
So having 2 graphical task for this will confuse newbie users, will
expert, by nature, are perfectly able to customize their system to suit
their needs.

Canonical do this because that's a transition state, as the Software
center is not fully finished. They plan to have it as full featured as
synaptic for 10.10, according to
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#Roadmap , and while it is not
written, I assume they will then remove synaptic from default
installation. 

As a side note, having 2 graphical softwares for the same task also
requires twice the amount of test before release. And 2 differents
codepaths would also mean twice more bugs ( since there is 2 time more
code ). Nothing that can't be done of course, but maybe it is wiser to
spend QA time elsewhere.

-- 
Michael Scherer