Package: apt Version: 0.7.11 Severity: wishlist Hi,
I was trying to think about ways to manage the package chaos
(apt-cache stats shows about 30000 packages) from the perspective of a
normal user, who would be totally overwhelmed by this number. Tasks is
one way to attack this, but I don't think it's alone sufficient.
I don't have a polished and ready to market idea for this, but here's
some food for thought.
As you probably know, for archive disk space reasons many packages are
split into an architecture specific package and a data package. I
think most users wouldn't be interested in the fact that there is a
data package (except when they explicitly ask for the information, or
in some kind of expert mode), and I think it would generally be a good
policy manage the chaos by only showing information the user is likely
to be interested in.
I think something might be achieved by for example being able to mark
a package as a "dependency only", which would mean that normal people
wouldn't be interested in the existence of the package unless they
install a package that depends on it.
There are about 400 packages named *-data, so I don't know if this
would be so radical an improvement, but I think it could be a
beginning.
Perhaps the idea could be somehow extended by estimating how likely it
is that a "normal user" would be interested in a package (another
reason for being disinterested would be that the package is almost
certainly required). For example, as I programmer, I probably know if
I need the bison parser generator or the gnat Ada compiler, or at
least I can search for them with the keywords "parser" and "Ada"; I
don't consider seeing them in a list of packages nearly as important
as, say, openoffice.org (a user new to Debian might not know that the
office suite is named openoffice.org and might not know how to search
for it).
I think at least support for this would need to be as low as in apt,
hence filing this bug against apt.
One question is, why are for example -data packages for games in the
games section? Of course that's the logical place for them to be from
the developer's point of view, but for a normal user, it's not a game,
it's something that the game needs and the package manager can pull it
from wherever it is. Showing the -data packages among the games only
confuses the user.
Ok, the idea needs polishing (if you agree at all it's a good thing to
do), just hoped I could provoke some thoughts.
Regards,
Sami
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