alpha
alpha update
sparc
sparc update
i386
<no i386 update>
This is where I was confused. I was trying to modify rc files and everything else. In the end, I just needed to point to a different archive (rpmfind.net).
I have been using rpmfind for a long time now and I understand that this program is a gui front end tieing together rpm and rpmfind. The concept is great - and once I got it figured out it was rather easy to use.
My comments are more on the documentation. While the document seems much better than many of the "free" programs out there I don't think it takes the beginner into account. In addition, I believe it takes a functional approach instead of the more practical tutorial approach a beginner might be able to get his hands around. A description of what a menu item does can't help if the user can't figure out why or when he'd want to do it. There is little background on RPM and online archives.
In RH (I can't speak about any of the others) RPMs form the core of building and maintaining a linux system. For many (I would guess) just latching on to linux, RPMs are probably the most confusing aspect. I know that when I first loaded linux about 6 months ago my first 10 questions specifically had to do with RPMs and how to use them. "Maximum RPM" - when I finally found it - was a great help. Glint was simple to use and understand - though maybe feature limited.
Gnorpm seems rich in features - but for someone just picking up a linux system it could be made much easier simply by creating a tutorial manual. I think "Maximum RPM" would be a good guide for the layout of a gnorpm manual. In addition, it probably should be mentioned as recommended reading.
Sorry for being long-winded. You wrote a great program here, now it needs a manual (how-to?) to do it justice.
Kevin
James Henstridge wrote:
I would be interested in what people think about this. The rpmfind code
in gnorpm is not perfect, and could do with a bit of tuning. You can
currently disable distributions by setting their rating to -1.It would be useful to have the have some distributions turned off by
default. I don't know if turning all but one is such a great idea though
(the user will often want one of the contrib archives at least).For most people's systems, it is best to turn off some distributions (eg.
SuSE and Red Hat often have conflicting package names, so you probably
only want to search for either SuSE or Red Hat packages, but not both.
There are some small incompatibilities in the other distributions, but the
RH/SuSE one is the biggest.The current code can already eliminate packages for the wrong
architecture, so it is not necessary to exclude other architectures from
the allowed distribution list.Does anyone have any ideas about what the best way to handle this is?
James.
--
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW: http://www.daa.com.au/~james/On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> > The distributions page allows you to place ratings on the different
> > distributions that are indexed on the rpmfind server. It also allows you
> > to specify your favourite mirror. If you are using the www.redhat.com
> > metadata server (the default for binary distributed with RH6). On the
> > other hand, if you use the larger rpmfind.net server, there are about 90
> > distributions, so you may want to give the rpmfind code some hints as to
> > what to pick (for a start, if you are using a red hat based distribution,
> > set the SUSE distributions in the list to -1, so they don't get chosen).
> > If you want, don't even worry about this page.
>
> James,
>
> my analysis of the feedback I got from rpmfind users tends to prove that
> it's a not well know feature. Maybe a simplistic default option like
> "fetch only from the iinstalled distribution" turned on by default would
> avoid troubles. This would also I guess cover distributors concerns, and
> avoid them having the default setup pointing to a reduced metadata base
> like RedHat did for 6.0.
> Then being able to pick in a menu a set of other distribs and "add them"
> would allow "experienced users" to have a richer set to choose from (however
> source package queries should really search the full set).
>
> Daniel
>
> --
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