[maemo-developers] What category should network filesystems like OpenAFS go under?

[From: tz]

I would have to agree with Graham's point.

If the whole application manager apt-get dists debian system is going
to be so brittle that the only SAFE way to get an application on to
your system is with Application Manager in blue-pill mode, then there
should be a user/cli category or something.

Having something that is otherwise useless without doing CLI
interaction is different than something that is specifically useful on
the CLI itself.  If I port Kismet, it might automatically open an
Xterm from a script, but it will run in text mode until a GTK frontend
or something else is done.  And some things are diagnostic that you
want to be available for when something does go wrong.  You can't
possibly build everything into the apps or add enough things on.

The problem is that INVISIBLE EQUALS UNINSTALLABLE and VISIBLE EQUALS
USER/* as far as the Application manager is concerned.  Well, not
quite, but I can't create an X.install file or anything else except an
isolated .deb if it is not in user/*

Since there is no clean way of doing this, either user/whatever gets
cluttered up with a bunch of things simply to make them safely
installable, or everyone uses apt-get, dpkg, or red-pill mode and
breaks their tablets, or you create junk meta-packages that install a
very short doc file but "depend" on the real file solely for the
purpose of pulling that file in.

Right now all three manners of ugliness are being used, and I think
there have been enough pleas to get it fixed.  The worst possible
outcome is for whatever reorganization, refactoring, etc. to happen
and yet we will still be stuck with all three hacks after it was
supposedly fixed.

Call it user/advanced, user/powertools, user/dangerous or whatever, or
create a second major category to make things visible and safely
installable, poweruser/*, etc. or something.  Let them be disabled by
default like Extras is now, but so that it can be turned on.

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Graham Cobb <g+770 at cobb.uk.net> wrote:
> On Saturday 08 November 2008 08:56:28 Andrew Flegg wrote:
>> No, it's not wagging the dog. If a user needs to open a terminal,
>> create a configuration file and run something from the command line; I
>> *strongly* believe it's outside the scope of the Application Manager.
>>
>> Since there's a requirement to use the terminal to configure it, it is
>> no extra step to require the user to use apt-get to install it.
>
> I see your point but I don't quite agree.  Xterm is a standard part of the
> tablet and I think command line utilities have a place in AppMgr.  An obvious
> example is ssh!  And possibly most of the applications which will go into the
> developer tools category.
>
> I don't think we really want to be encouraging people to use apt-get,
> particularly while "apt-get upgrade" can break your system.
>
> But I do think that there should be a category specifically for command line
> tools so that people who do not use the command line don't have to waste time
> on them.  And I also agree that a GUI configuration dialogue for a system
> tool is much better than expecting someone to edit a config file.
>
> Graham
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