By the way, there is also a bounty on making synaptic more “colorful” . Look at this : http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/FindingPackages
http://niran.org/code/soc/

ANd the future of installing :

http://autopackage.org/ui-vision.html

I also found a comment by one of the autopackage dev’s: “There is a patch floating around that integrates autopackage and synaptic, but it’s not been merged yet.”

And here is matt zimmermans response: https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8308

Eyyy amigos!
I’m due to goto the tendist sooner or later but after reading Nat’s blog…
About his experience and the fact I have 4 bad teeth
means I’m going to expone this as much as possible
Anyhow some screenshots of Long…

This “install new Software…” is a good idea, but can’t substitute education. Windowsuser will never look for new software on their very own PC. They will go out to the internet and google for it. On the vendor site (aka a sourceforge project page), they will click on Download and get the tarball. I think this is way everybody whines about Linux and that you have to compile everything yourself.This package manager concept is just to strange for windows people.

One of the positive core arguments for Ubuntu are the nice Communities and Forum. I don’t know wether they are really better (Gentoo Forums are still the bleeding edge tweakers i think) but it shows the way to solve this problem.

You can only fix the software to some degree, to fix the user is more effective.

These vendor apps could install in the main file tree if they dared, but, I notice that many tend to prefer to install in /opt or /usr/local. And they create their own file tree in their directory…. vendorAdd/etc, bin, doc, man, lib, libexec, etc…. Kind of like how OS X has a little file tree inside the .App folders. (I wonder where they got that idea from :-) ).

Whichever model a vendor chooses is up to them.

The idea of a single universe of packages would not be violated with this. The universe will always be controlled by the distribution. Vendors would be given second class status.

For the newbie user, this should work out, because the vendor is a an identifiable quantity, in the way a distro is an identifiable quantity. They can make gross decisions (large in scope) about what to install, or leave out.

For the experienced user, they can still go fine grained, with packages, sources, and even specific patches.

I know this sounds very commercial, and it is, but I think it would work. It probably won’t happen, because it invites too much competition into the market, to start making revenues before the early investors make their money back.

As for your Install new applications.. button, check out gnome-app-install package (you mentioned you were using ubuntu, it’s in main). It uses a different approach to install applications, and i think it looks pretty good actually.

The install:// URI might be a good idea, assuming there is a proper design that is common for all platforms. It needs to be done in a way so that it has proper fallbacks. Something like, try the current repository setup, try a fallback repository setup (set up by the vendor), try a secondary fallback (set up by some common nominator), fall back to something like autopackage version of the software. That way we can be certain that the basic setup of the computer doesn’t mess up the installation. Someone might have a setup where their sources (yes, i’m talking about apt systems mostly) are set up so that the package manager only looks from the CD that the user has, it’s most likely that the CD doesn’t have the software the website wants to install, this is something that needs to be worked around. Also it’s a big challenge for usability and GUI people, how they bring out the security issues so that the user fully understands the risks involved. We really need to avoid the ‘question.. OK.. warning.. OK.. Error.. OK…’ behaviour that can be seen amongst windows users.

I strongly believe we need to find a better way to manage our software and the apt/yum repository’s aren’t going to cut it.

w00t since when did they put you on the monologue? :)

Czubin

I totally love the idea of adding “Install new software” to the Applications menu. It makes 100% sense. Cleaning up administration / system preferences / system tools is also a must have for future versions of gnome. The OSX control panel does things so right, gnome-control-centre could also go this route.

An install:// handler would be great as a fd.o standard. Have a gconf key holding details on where to go and what to do, and you have yourself a very simple way to distribute software. Application Vendors could then post links on their websites, which the individual distributions would then be able to provide. Again, 100% brilliant.

AppFolders on OSX are good, but I think linux package management is better. It just needs some newbie love.

I have experienced this with every linux distro I have tried. It either means waiting (and waiting) for the package maintainer to update or add the package you want, or ditching the package manager and compiling the software you need yourself. In some cases, the developers of the software provide packages for your system. Great! Except figuring out how to integrate their repository/packages into your system is not usually trivial.

Okay, so Windows world: You go to the website of the software package, download the new version and install it. I don’t see what is wrong with this paradigm? Especially for commercial software developers whose software will not be included in your repository. Hey, I’m all for Free Software and that – but let’s face it – as Linux gains more popularity more commercial software will become available for it.

Maybe Autopackage will provide the solution here, I don’t know. If it does, then maybe distro maintainers need to integrate it strongly into their product, not to replace the package manager, but rather to supplement it.