On Monday 01 Aug 2005 13:59, Rasatmakananda wrote:
On Mon, 2005-08-01 at 15:27 +0300, z4ziggy wrote:
i still think Arch can use a good pacman-frontend, but i would prefer seeing a pygtk wrapper (as i think xerxes2 is trying todo with lazypac, and as the Frugalware guys are aiming for the same goal) will be more Arch oriented (KISS). with that said, im still sure many users will appreciate your work and wont mind using a java frontend :)
The "magic" word is KISS that touches Archers' interest. It doesn't mean it cannot be GUI, its something else what users consider as "simple". In Arch "simple" is different what other distros are considering. Not easy to grasp. The "the Arch way" is good to read before starting a project for Arch. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way
I had studied the Arch Way for a while. I couldn't decide whether my app contradicted TAW. In someways, it obviously has because you can't get to the full pacman functionality via the GUI. However, I felt I had achieved the majority without dumbing down and losing usability. It's a tricky balance. There just seemed to be a need for a frontend. I wasn't personally convinced that it was essential. My original motivation for Jacman was to show just how much more efficient one could be with pacman via the command-line as opposed to a GUI! However, some people are comfortable with GUIs. Just think how synaptic has helped make Debian (and its derivatives) more attractive to average users rather than using apt. Horses for courses. I still use pacman, of course :)
What I didn't know, only recently, not confirmed, the selection of language is also part of Arch's concept of KISS. http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=13576
This is surely from a programmers perspective, i.e., languages that make programming easy. I really don't think that language choice was part of Judd's vision, since he's a C programmer. Andy