Re: [Synaptic-devel] obsolete and locally installed, seems mistaken

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 04:33, Albert wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 January 2004 14:21, Richard Bos wrote:
> > Op woensdag 14 januari 2004 09:25, schreef Panu Matilainen:
> <snip>
> > > "What the heck is apt?" If you have an end user using synaptic to
> > > install packages [s]he might never have even heard of apt and will
> > > be just confused. I'd suggest against these variants.
> 
> As the user whose question triggered this thread, I thought I would 
> offer some non-technical feedback.  (1)  A synaptic user who doesn't 
> know that synaptic is a GUI for get-apt is unlikely to understand 
> anything he is looking at anyway 

People are actually using Synaptic in the distro installer (Conectiva)
and it might come pre-installed as "Install and remove software" in a
menu - not everybody needs to know what's lying underneath. People who
know "Synaptic is a GUI frontend to apt" are probably the majority
though.

> and (2) my personal preference is 
> "Non-apt package" or "Non-synaptic package." 

Except those are otherwise misleading/wrong - there are no "apt
packages", there are deb's and rpm's :) Even "Non-apt managed package"
isn't quite right because you *can* remove the package using
apt/synaptic -> you're managing it to some extent.

> 
> I suspect that the typical user of SuSE started out with YAST for 
> package managment, as I did.  Apt/Synaptic only came to my attention 
> after installing from FTP and then reading SuSE mail lists.  So, from 
> my perspective, the bulk of my packages were installed automatically by 
> YAST and only a few, so far, have been installed automatically via 
> Synaptic.  To me a "manual" installation is one that does not involve 
> RPM package management at all, but rather compiling and installing 
> tarballs.

"Manually installed software" (compiled + installed) vs "Manually
installed package" (rpm or deb) but as others have said as well
"manually installed package" doesn't cover all the cases it should
represent (something which isn't available from known sources)

This is kinda funny.. this is one of the longer threads I remember
seeing on synaptic-devel, over a seemingly simple language issue :) 

        - Panu -