[kubuntu-devel] Muon Discover

[Harald Sitter]

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 2:42 PM, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 02:25:27PM -0800, Scarlett Clark wrote:
>> >    Is this the default package manager? Or Muon?
>> >
>> >    I need all ways to bring this up eg.. command line. I have so far in
>> > a
>> >    search from KickOff and KickOff->Programs->Muon Discover
>>
>> We have both Muon and Muon Discover installed by default.  Arguably this
>> is application duplication and very un-ubuntu.
>>
>> Does anyone have an opinion of whether Muon Discover is mature enough to
>> stand along and for Muon to be removed from the images?
>>
>> You can access it by KickOff -> Computer -> Software Centre too which I'd
>> expect to be the primary method.
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
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>
>
> I would say that the decision is not really about maturity but about user
> target. I don't think an end-user should understand all the semantics that
> Muon Package Manager exposes. If a user has the knowledge to use Muon PM he
> has the knowledge to install it from Discover or even apt-get.

Indeed. The argument never was that software center or discover
weren't mature enough, but that they do not deal in packages. They
deal in applications (read: in things that have a desktop file). So if
you want or need to install a package (say 'bzip2') you won't be able
to do that with discover because of the way it is designed.

Personally I always found this argument silly because it implies that
a user knows the difference between Muon and Muon Discover and will
choose the correct tool for the job at hand <- so very very very
unlikely...

Really there are three groups of people we have to consider:
a) the user who only wants to installation an application and will not
ever want to install a package (by himself, support cases excluded
becasue those usually will offer concrete apt-get commands anyway)
b) the user who perhaps could be called a sysadmin and wants to
explicitly manage packages, but likes to do it in a GUI
c) the user who likes direct control but feels that a GUI slows him down

And here is the thing.
A user of group a) won't be able to graps the concept of either b) or
c) and have a very hard time trying to manage 'apps'.
A user of group b) will be able to deal with the usage paradigm of a)
but might not be able to do what c) does.
A user of group c) will be able to do manage 'apps' and 'packages' given a gui.

Looking at the presented use cases there is no reason why muon (the
package manager) needs to be part of the default install. You could
technically even remove apt-get itself. Because b) will be able to use
muon-discover to install muon and c) will be able to use muon-discover
to install muon to install apt-get. Of course latter is not very
convenient so one can make an argument for keeping apt-get regardless
(plus I doubt you could remove it anyway ;))

Long story short: if someone wants a gui package manger, they can
manually install muon via discover or apt-get, absolutely no reason
why we'd need it in the default install.

HS