[Synaptic-devel] Improved apt frontend - package manager (all apt developers shoud colaborate !!!)

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas]

Hi,

In previos bugreport you asked me:
> In what respect to you think synaptic is harder for beginners (compared to
> red-carpet or stormpkg)? I'm working in on a new gui for synaptic
> right now, so suggestions are welcome. Some screenshots are available
> at: 
> http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/newgui/synaptic2-1.jpeg
> http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/newgui/synaptic2-2.jpeg

Stormpkg is easier to use, because there are easy accesible possibilities to
filter packages by decriptions.
Beginners don't know packages names and if beginner want to install some
program (for example video player) he writes "video player" into package
description filter. Synaptic should have easy acessible possibility to 
filter or search packages by decriptions like stormpkg.
Also with stormpkg is easier to install recommended or suggested packages 
and also easily sort packages by name/install status/size/etc by clicking on 
headers of package tree table.

Red-carpet package manager is very user friendly and also has wonderfull
feature - with red-carpet you can install local packages (and dependencies
are automatically installed from internet). In command line you
can do this with these commands (if deb_package has pre-depens installed):

dpkg -i deb_package
apt-get -f install

more about this you can read here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=47379
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=88616

Maybe  somebody could implement this feature in synaptic and after testing 
this feature could be implemented in apt too ?

Mantas Kriauciunas <address@hidden>

P.S. Why debian has more than 5 partially working apt frontends: stormpkg,
synaptic, deity and deity-gtk (very good, but pretty unstable apt frontend,
currently with no maintainer :( - see http://bugs.debian.org/deity),
captain, gnome-apt, aptitude and no one stable and full-featured ? Maybe
it's time to colaborate ? Synaptic, deity-gtk and gnome-apt are based on
gtk, maybe synaptic and gnome-apt developers can colaborate and improve one
program ?