Re: [devel] Another idea

On Sun, Jan 11 at 02:53, Dominique Devriese wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I played around a bit with making Kapture not show the Debian package
> names in the list view, but instead the short description.  I have got
> some code running, but it is unfortunately
> 
> 1. Pretty slow ( the short and long descriptions are not part of the
>    cache that apt maintains, 

AFAIK they are. Don't know if this is the fastest method but you can
create pkgRecords object and call its ShortDesc() and LongDesc(). The
only thing I remember useful for average user and not present in apt
cache is the list of package files.

>    so they have to be gotten from the packages files directly ).

Are you reading the data from /var/lib/dpkg/info? There is no
information about not installed packages there. On the other hand
/var/lib/dpkg/available is usually incomplete and horribly outdated...

>    Thus, the displaying of the entire list takes quite a while ( as in
>    half a minute or so )

What is the entire list? List of packages installed or available? How
many packages are in there and why do you want to display descriptions
for all of them, not only for the ones at the moment visible for the
user? 

> 2. Pretty unusable.  The current Debian package Descriptions are not
>    usable for this purpose.  They're meant to be shown alongside the
>    package name, not instead of it.  I would personally like it
>    otherwise, as the package names are obviously not interesting to
>    the user

For me it is. For example when I look for some program I start from
searching for the package having this program name as a part of the
name. The description along with the package name is of course really
handy but the name IMO should also be there.

[...]
> 
> 1. Filter out a lot of packages by default

Right.

> 2. Sort the others as much as possible, preferably in a way that a
>    user would normally look for them.

Right.

> 3. Show user-friendly names for them.  A user is not interested in a
>    name like "gnome-themes", "GNOME 2 Desktop Themes" looks much more
>    interesting.

Well, the short descriptions are maybe not ideal but in conjunction with
names are not bad for this purpose.

Regards,

-- 
Marcin Pawlik