App of the Month: KDissert (KDE.News) [LWN.net]

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 17, 2005 21:27 UTC (Mon) by robertm (subscriber, #20200) [Link]

Negative-first step: realize that piping shell scripts from some random website into a command interpreter is an idea worthy of Internet Explorer, and use your trusted distribution's package instead. It's just an "aptitude install kdissert" away in Debian Sarge after all, and can't be much further in other systems.

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 18, 2005 0:44 UTC (Tue) by kdissident (guest, #33152) [Link]

Oh, boy -- right you are! I mean about the "piping shell scripts" thingie...

But surely thanks to your outstanding smartness, you will be able to do a wget klik.atekon.de/client/install without any piping to a shell? And then inspect the downloaded script with your meticulous eyes? And report back any randomness and Internet-Explorer-ness contained therein? Right?

Or are you afraid that the script will eat your valued $EDITOR upon being inspected, and then self-destroy itself?

About your "aptitude install kdissert"-awayness -- this unfortunately is *not* true for everyone. Not all distros offer native packages the day after a new upstream version of an app is released.

And aptitude *installs* the software into the *system*. And the installation *overwrites* your current kdissert installation. -- What if you are not sure that you really want to update to a new kdissert? What if you first want to convince yourself? How can you safely testdrive it? How can you do so side-by-side with the current version, without much conflicting? How can you easily get rid of the new version in case it doesnt suite you?

klik is ideal for this: testing new versions of software. About installation into the system, overwriting system libs and current versions: klik doesnt do this -- it copies a file to your system that represents the software for easy testing (as well as deleting).

klik and aptitude are no competitors. klik aims for a different use case. But I think you will not understand. Next time, you'll be repeating the same argument, maybe with a slight variation.

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 18, 2005 3:51 UTC (Tue) by spot (subscriber, #15640) [Link]

Seems like every "check out new application" article on LWN has come with an unsolicited advertisement for klik lately. :P

Don't be a dick.

Posted Oct 18, 2005 5:23 UTC (Tue) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

The project you advocate is put in a bad light whenever you act hostile towards others' questions about it.

Be polite, and the project will be better off for it.

Don't be a dick.

Posted Oct 19, 2005 13:01 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

klik sounds ok.

It seems a lot better then that autopackage thing.

Maybe you can help adoption by realising that most people are worried about automaticly installing unknown scripts from the internet. Something like having a bug track system for accountability and a secure system for storing digital checksums of packages would probably go a long way to making people comfortable with the system.

After all even Firefox runs whitelists of trusted websites that are allowed to install extensions of their software. That makes people feel better about this sort of thing.

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 18, 2005 12:03 UTC (Tue) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link]

" klik and aptitude are no competitors. klik aims for a different use case. But I think you will not understand. Next time, you'll be repeating the same argument, maybe with a slight variation. "

So, how does kdissert compares to Freemind ?

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 11:48 UTC (Mon) by ita_est (guest, #33296) [Link]

> So, how does kdissert compares to Freemind ?

This is comparing apples to oranges: kdissert is for creating documents while freemind is for mind-mapping.

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 25, 2005 16:50 UTC (Tue) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link]

Not really splitting hairs here, but that would rather be like comparing Cortlands to Macintoshes, rather than apples to oranges.

I.e. These two are in the same category of tools and differentiates in their features. As they say on their web site and as you already pointed out, kdissert is a mind mapping-like tool.

So a video editing tool it ain't ;-)

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 18, 2005 12:52 UTC (Tue) by fjf33 (subscriber, #5768) [Link]

I used emerge but same difference. I liked it (kdissert is it). We were actually looking in class at a non-free, actually expensive, mind mapping software with some people talking about Visio for that too. So this was pretty good timing. Then I impressed everyone with the ability to generate documents from it, presentations, pictures. I havent tried the other suggested one from the thread but this is very usable.

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 18, 2005 16:13 UTC (Tue) by jeld (guest, #22397) [Link]

I would gladly try this new, shining, magical way of installing stuff, if it only worked. Obviously I wouldn't just pipe stuff from the internet through a shell on my system, but at least I would take a look at the script and decide if it is safe to run. Not going to happen. The web site is not responding and all I get are timeout errors. Mirrors? Ooops, cannot find any. Oh, well, so much for the great klick. Oh, and mind you, if it DID work, could you point me to a GNOME client? I am sorry, I don't have KDE installed and I am not planning to install the whole qt/kdelibs/kdebase shebang just to try out a non-functional software distribution scheme.

klik://kdissert (fastest way to test kdissert)

Posted Oct 18, 2005 23:30 UTC (Tue) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

Playing devil's advocate here, but wouldn't you need the KDE libs to run KDissert in the first place?

kdissert versus freemind, from a freemind user of just over 1 month

Posted Oct 20, 2005 10:44 UTC (Thu) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

OK, I'm going out on a limb here by commenting on kdissert itself rather than on klik or emerge, so please bear with me ;-)

Jokes apart, I've been using freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net) for a while now, and I have been *completely* bowled over by this tool. Until you use freemind (or similar tools), you'll wonder why it's called mind mapping.

But kdissert has 2 big minuses and one smaller one, all IMHO of course. Firstly, even though this is version 1.0.5, there is no "find text" function anywhere! I've created large enough maps in freemind to need that function, and this has to be even more true in kdissert (see below for why).

Second, though the ROADMAP file lists "outlining" as one of the things kdissert will never do, folding an entire subtree is a very important part of freemind for me. My trees can get large, and sometimes it's nice to fold away a part I dont want to think about. I'm funny that way :-)

Finally, the UI is much more clunky than freemind -- freemind looks so much more polished and pleasing to the eye. Although I've been using freemind more than a month, and "in production" so to speak, and kdissert only for a couple of days, I still feel this comment is justified, and that using it long enough will make only a small difference to my opinion.

kdissert's biggest plus is that, true to its name, (well, duh!) it is much more suited to writing whole documents ("dissertations"), by allowing arbitrarily long text to be attached to each node, without cluttering the graph itself. Freemind requires all the text to be on the node -- think bullet points versus whole paragraphs. My needs are much more oriented toward presentations than documents, so I'm OK, but for others this may well be the deciding factor.

And that is why it bothers me so much more that that vital Ctrl-F is missing!

Sitaram