what I would love

Posted Jan 27, 2011 2:49 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: what I would love by albertoafn
Parent article: Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

It is just a huge amount of work for the developers of the packages (who probably do their work only because they enjoy a rather different set of challenges) just for satisfying the idle curiosity of a few random browsers. Won't happen.

That without even going into how do you get the developers to agree on a standard way of describing their packages. The closest thing today are the webpages of the packages. Now just look at the web pages for, say Gnome and TeX, or GCC and LibreOffice, and say what the similarities are, and how you can force all the different data into a common format. TeX or GCC won't have any use for a video of its "user interface" (which one?), while for Gnome or Libreoffice it could be important. The "input format" for TeX and GCC is given, either by the package itself or external definition. Today either a package does work fine with all the major graphical environments, or none; it would be probably much more informative to tell if it works with some of the niche ones (and I don't want to have to check something out on an environment that I barely know). For (La)TeX there are literally dozens of GUIs available, on a huge variety of systems. Same for GCC. For TeX there are lots of websites and newsgroups, even publications, around tips and tricks. Which one to pick to suggest in such a case?