Please remove Software Sources from the menus, it's destructive.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad joerlend.schinstad at gmail.com
Wed Feb 27 12:43:04 GMT 2008


> I'm aware of the differences of the package managers. It's just that I
>  don't need Synaptic, whereas Software Sources is one of my most executed
>  administrative applications (does not matter if it's technically part of
>  Synaptic or not, for the user it appears as a different app).

If you don't install software, then why would you need to add any
repositories at all?

>  Either I want to install an end-user application, this is what
>  "Add/Remove" does perfectly and IMHO more comfortable than Synaptic.

I agree; Add/Remove is a beautiful application! You should use it whenever
you can, and tell all new users to use it. However, the applications listed
in Add/Remove is decided by app-install-data, and not the repositories you
add, so Add/Remove is irrelevant in this context. If you add a repository
with a new application, then you'd still have to use Synaptic to install it.
Well, you can always open up a terminal and run some commands there if you
like, but you probably shouldn't unless you know what you're doing.

>  Or I want to install libraries (e.g. for development purposes) or server
>  processes, then I'm already at command-line level. Instructions on Wiki
>  pages always use "apt-get install" rather than Synaptic.

It shouldn't use "sudo apt-get install" at all. It's _really_ bad practice.
Starting with Gutsy, we have support for apturl, which makes it easy to
install software by simply clicking links, such as: Install
Firefox<apt://firefox>

If you're installing a server, then in many cases you'll want to use the
task in any case. As an apt-get user, you'll probably not have discovered
tasks, and will probably install packages manually instead, making the
install a lot more complicated for you. It's very interesting to see that a
three page guide for installing LAMP with apt-get, could be simplified to a
single, short line using Synaptic. The guide shouldn't have used apt-get at
all, but tasksel. But is there any reason why you'd want to use apt-get and
tasksel instead of Synaptic? I think, in many cases, Synaptic does a better
job than both of them.


>  I don't want to say that Synaptic is not a good tool. It's just that it
>  fails to fill in a use-case of my daily Ubuntu work.

Perhaps you don't know it well enough? It seems to me, you're a living
example of consequences of the problems I'm describing.

Best regards,

Jo-Erlend Schinstad
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