On 01/28/2014 03:12 PM, Richard Hughes wrote:
On 28 January 2014 18:43, Przemek Klosowski<przemek.klosow...@nist.gov> wrote:
There are two separate issues here: 'abandonment', and 'GUIness'. As to the
latter, I think it's a mistake to have a primary application installation
tool that only deals with GUI apps, because it relegates text-based tools,
such as 'units', to a second-class status of being hard to find and to
install.
That's not the tool we've designed and built. We've built a GUI
application installer, not a package installer.
[sorry fo the delayed answer---I got wrapped up and had this draft
sitting open for two weeks]
While it's not the fault of the installer, I am concerned about that
distinction. For better or worse, a lot of useful tools seem to be out
of scope for a 'GUI application installer'. GCC, perl, git, octave, R,
units, mysql/sqlite3, this kind of thing. It doesn't even make sense to
shoehorn them into GUI app world by embedding them in terminals, because
their natural environment is command-line interaction.
The emphasis on GUI is great, but it should enhance rather than
deprecate the old-style interactive command model that arguably is the
core idea in Unix. Your tool, while improving the GUI app experience,
could also support non GUI software---or at least not completely ignore
its existence. I do get it that there is a class of GUI users that need
to see a window with buttons and help, and non-GUI apps simply baffle
them with a blinking command prompt, at best. OTOH, I believe there
should be a setting in the installer about that, "do not show me
commandline software". I believe that it should be off by default, but
maybe I am wrong about that.
Do you really think it's impossible?
By the way, I even use some commandline-like apps on my Android. In
fact, I dislike the fact that the 'GUI app' view of the world results in
separate app for every function: an app for Slashdot, and a slightly
different app for Reddit.
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