finding packages: Tkinter vs. python-tk

[Jared Norris]

On 3 July 2012 07:15, Peter Teuben <teuben at astro.umd.edu> wrote:
>
> One of my frustrations, perhaps as a newcomer to Ubuntu (from fedora),
> is the amount of packages
> I need to install to get my development going. I used to just say in fedora,
> i was
> a developer, and most of the stuff was just there.   Very little to add.
> In ubuntu, you get gcc, but no g++ or gfortran, and that's just the start. I
> tried
> a DVD version this weekend, but still had to install a long long list.  Is
> there
> a shortcut to this, i didn't see anything in the installation procedure.

I'm not a developer myself but I'm led to believe the shortcut is
installing the build-essential package [1]. I'm sure someone will
correct me if I'm wrong.

> As an example of the frustration:
>
> Today, I needed tkinter in one of my applications.  The "Ubuntu Software
> Center" found
> no match for tkinter (in IDLE , but that didn't pan out into something
> useful).
> In the end, i found it as an option under"python-tk", but why didn't the
> search in
> that U.S.C find it?
>
> On the command line I found it via
>
>                      dpkg -l | grep -i tkinter
>
>
>
> why is this common procedure not debugged (or has it been regressed) after
> so many
> versions?
>
> peter
>

At the bottom of the USC you will see a little link with the comment
"Show XX technical items" where XX respresents the number of packages
that your search found but were hidden as most users would not
normally need to use them. Simply clicking that link displays all the
search results. Tkinter is the 5th result in the list after the items
that were already displayed in my USC search.

I must admit at times I find this counter intuitive but then again for
anyone that is simply an end user it is probably a much better
experience than searching for an item with over 100 results when all
you really need is a small handful of programs.

[1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/build-essential


-- 
Regards,

Jared Norris JP(Qual) BBehSc(Psych)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JaredNorris