making Ubuntu easy

[James "Doc" Livingston]

On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 09:52 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Chanchao wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 21:36 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> > 
> >> The fact is that when a user tries to play an mp3, he should be given
> >> the option to install support
>
> Windows, when confronted with an unknown file type, will ask if you want to
> open it with an existing program or search for a solution on the net - I
> wonder how difficult it would be to implement a solution that would (a)
> suggest that proprietary file formats can't be directly handled by Ubuntu
> because of licensing issues; and (b) google (reliably) for a fix.

A reasonable amount of progress can be had by using a mimetype->action
map. Some mimetypes could map to "package $FOO (main)", for which it
would say to the user "You need to install package $FOO to open this
file, would you like to?". Others could have "package $FOO (universe)"
which would do the same, plus give the spiel about universe packages if
you hadn't enabled it already.

Exactly what to do for things that don't have supporting packages is
another question, but I'm sure people can think up appropriate actions.


I've been hacking on something similar to this for Rhythmbox, a plugin
that will automagically install the necessary GStreamer plugins to
decode your files. Hopefully I'll get some time to turn it into a
library or whatever, so that Totem and the like can use it too.


> > This To All Applications Of The World, Hear Ye:
> > 
> >  *** If there's errors, Pop Up A #*&@(*@$# Window!!  ***
> 
> It depends.  _errors_ - things that prevent you from doing what you want -
> should pop up a window.  One thing that even novice users prefer in Ubuntu
> to Windows is that it _won't_ pop up windows to tell you things that aren't
> actually necessary and you can't understand anyway.  The corollary is that
> when error windows _do_ pop up, they should actually tell you something
> useful, not just "Error: -168 at line 1432" (not a particularly Linux or
> Ubuntu problem - I've probably seen more messages of this sort on Windows).

+1

Applications should pop up error windows if the failure was related to
something the user explicitly asked for, the user can be reasonably
expected to fix the problem, or is a serious problem that the user
*needs* to know about.


An application that I have running in the background shouldn't pop up
errors for things that can reasonably be expected to happen and I can't
do anything about. Like saying my connection to an IRC server dropped
out, it should just automatically reconnect and get on with it.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. That way,
if he doesn't like what you have to say, it'll be OK because you'll be a
mile away and you'll have his shoes.