Chapter 13 - Software Installation

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <200007112225.BAA00532 at zeus.sot.com>, Santeri Kannisto
<ss at zeus.sot.com> writes
>Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
>>
>
>[clip]
>
>> 13.3.1 Category
>> 
>> Is used to group similar packages together. For example "databases",
>> "corelibs", "X11", "Gnome", "KDE", "Games". Sub-categories are
>> permitted, should there be sufficient packages to make this worth while.
>
>That is rather confusing to beginners and advanced users probably
>know what they are looking for. Moreover, if you consider custom
>selections in installers or menu's in graphical environment
>the output would be useless.

What on earth would a beginner be doing looking there in the first
place...
>
>Consider eg. looking for Linux games: which category you should
>select (KDE, GNOME, X11 or Games)? Or what does X11 tell to a novice?
>
>I suggest organizing packages according to use like:
>
>1. Work
>2. Entertainment
>3. Networks
>4. Development
>5. System
>6. Help
>
>Number of top level categories should be also limited because
>of the limits of meat-machines.
>
If you mean humans, why? /etc gets extremely cluttered, and nobody cares
because for the most part nobody's interested in taking a flesh-and-
blood eyeball to it. Same here.
>
>Another criteria could be how often you need these applications.
>In real work and real life computers are not used for configuring
>or playing with some hardware. Therefore I would consider putting
>"hardware" under 6. System and naming it according to use, eg. 
>Configuring (System/Configuring).
>
Sorry, but I think you've rather misunderstood what I was getting at.
The aim was that it should be text so that eyeballs/editors can be used,
but under normal circumstances, even experienced users would never want
to go near it.

Apologies, Santeri, but I think you and I were actually addressing
different issues - it's just that yours matched what I thought I was
looking for. I suspect what you want may well be seen as "standardizing
what doesn't need standardizing" and therefore outside the scope of the
LSB. A standard classification for users would be very nice but
different classifications are used to differentiate distributions. A
standard way of identifying what is on the system is required in order
for a Debian-packaged package to install correctly on RedHat (or even
RedHat on SuSE :-)
-- 
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports 
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999