Re: [Usability]User Object Simplification?

[Per Cederberg <per percederberg net>]

Sean Middleditch wrote:
> Not even.  This could be really confusing for a lot of packages, ones
> that ship multiple apps (i.e., trying uninstall the Calculator would
> remove all of GNOME Utils), or not fully remove apps that are broken
> into multiple packages (notice how Debian seems to break a single app
> into many packages, when it really doesn't make any sense whatsoever to
> do so - take Abiword, for example, or Open Office).  Also imagine how
> the dependencies could really confuse people.  "If you uninstall Blah,
> you'll have to uninstall Foo Bar and Baz" - most people would hopefully
> at least then not uninstall the app, but it could still cause some
> confusion, and fuzzes up the idea of a "Remove Application" feature,
> since it wouldn't actually work in many, many instances.

The thing to note here is that "uninstall application" doesn't
necessarily mean "remove package". As you note, packages and
applications do not always map one-to-one on each other. A
package on disk shouldn't be removed until all its applications
have be uninstalled by the user.

The gnome-utils package, then, wouldn't be physically removed
from disk until all applications in it have been uninstalled.
Uninstalling calculator should only cause all calculator icons
and launchers to be removed from the desktop.

> The way things are packaged up on Linux/UNIX these days, it isn't at all
> user friendly.  We're thinking of GNOME with this Object Simplification
> - *packages* need the same thing, really.  As a user, I don't
> install/manage libgconf, bonoboui, abiword-common, abiword-gnome,
> openoffice-fonts, etc. - I just have GNOME, Abiword, and OpenOffice.  I
> don't use gnome-utils, I use Calculater, Dictionary, etc.  The mapping
> between applications, support data/libraries, and system packages is a
> huge, barely understandable mess.

Agreed. There is definitely a need for some abstraction here.
I posted some thoughts on "application objects" previously in
this thread, but several related topics are floating around in
here too -- central application registry, preferred applications,
supported MIME-types, shortcuts vs. shadows...

There seem to be several application-settings that wants to
live somewhere central, easily accessible from the desktop.

/Per