Re: [Usability]User Object Simplification?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 05:43:51PM -0500, 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.

I'm pretty sure you could sort this all out without having to do
anything too complicated.

The simplest solution is to just inflict it on the user:

 rpm -ql | grep /usr/share/applications/.*\.desktop

 "The following applications are in the GNOME Utilities package;
  removing GNOME Calculator requires removing all of them."

Not great, but better than having to open a separate package manager
tool and find the app.

But with just a bit more work I'm sure you could make it suck less.

A lot of the harder packages to deal with would not be user-visible
and users wouldn't be allowed to uninstall them. e.g. gnome-desktop,
kernel, C library, etc., surely uninstalling those is disallowed for a
large class of users (with appropriate alternate UI for users who will
theoretically know what they are doing).

Havoc