[Synaptic-devel] Re: introduction and status debtags

[Alex de Landgraaf]

Quoting Michael Vogt <address@hidden>:

> I'm the maintainer and main developer of synaptic. Can you please help
> me making synaptic to a love releationship for you :) I mean, tell me
> about the stuff you hate (or even better post it to
> address@hidden) and we will try to address those issues.

Hehe, this was to be expected, I was a bit harsh. Sorry, please let me explain
:)

My main problem with the current debian package hierarchy is that you need to
know what you're looking for. You and I know what we want, a package is just a
search away, but browsing 10000+ packages in synaptic, aptitude or dselect for
a
new application isn't something an average user does voluntarily. It's not a
problem of synaptic, and I have only just played around with synaptic-debtags
(it should prove useful once it's more integrated), but if we want Debian to
appeal for new (non-technical) users we need to go in a different direction.
It's not my terrain but I'm afraid that direction is called an opensource
*bitestounge* Click&Run.

I think that with extra semantics above debian/control (again debtags),
server-side statistics and user-orientated descriptions put together in a
friendly webbased interface might be the single thing Debian still lacks on a
usability level. 
I don't like Lindows anymore than the next Debianer (well, we ignore them
mostly), but Click&Run does make a (reasonably) large amount of packages more
accessable for non-technical users. We've been discussing this in our little
Morphix-community, maybe the time is ripe for a push towards an opensource
alternative. 

Would I personally use it? Probably not. Would the regular Debian public use
it?
They'd probably go for synaptic first, and I wouldn't blame them. Still, I
believe it's worth considering: it would lower the threshold for new users who
can't see the the forrest through all the trees.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. I just wanted to state that synaptic is a nice piece of
work, it's just not for everyone and their neighbour.

Cheers,

Alex

PS. Flames should be sent to the list only, please CC everything else :)