Desktop apps

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 09:26:48AM -0500, Brian Chabot wrote:
> >>A decent file comparison and merge tool.
> >
> >FYI: I use "ediff" mode under emacs for this all the time and I am
> >very happy with this tool.  This mode handles directory trees and
> >three-way merges as well.  And, if I have to massage the code a tiny
> >bit after applying a diff, I can just resort to using the emacs
> >commands that I know very well at this point.
> 
> Aunt Tillie says she can't understand Emacs.

What in tarnation is Aunt Tilly doing trying to make binary diffs
anyway?

> Seriously, though it works great, this is not a tool for the masses. 
> Kate sure, Kwrite yup.  OOWriter, of course, but not Emacs.

Seriously, this makes no sense.  People who need this kind of
application are generally very technical and already have need
for an editor such as emacs, or something of the sort.  And Emacs has
menus these days, which are IIRC rather customizable, for those who
want that kind of thing.  And as Kevin mentions, best of all you can
manipulate the data using any of the vast library of tools and
functions which are part of Emacs, as well.  It seems like an
excellent tool for the job and its audience, if you ask me...

> For myself, I'd like to see real support for current Real Pleayer 
> (rather than a major revision and a half behind) and Quicktime and 

Here, I definitely agree with you.  But the only way to get this is to
pester the vendors, since they're proprietary apps/formats.  Sigh.

> better plugin support in Mozilla.  Hell, the plugin finder doesn't even 
> know how to find a plugin for midi. (not that I would use it often, but 
> it is an example.)

All you need is this:

  http://mozplugger.mozdev.org/

Most of the appliactions needed to handle almost any conceivable MIME
type are already on the typical Linux system.  You may need to edit
the config file a bit for your particular operating environment...
[And of course you still need to download proprietary plugins.]

> How about a nice, universal package manager?  Not Alien, but
> something more userfriendly.   

I'm going to go out on a limb, and make a prediction:

There never will be such a beast, because no distribution puts things
in the same place.  For the package manager to be truly "universal" it
would be necessary to either a) get all distro development teams to
put everything in exactly the same places (which the FSB has as its
goal, and it has helped, but it will never really solve the problem
completely), or b) have the package manager locate the right
destinations programmatically.  In simpler package cases, the latter
might be possible, but there will always be (a substantial number of)
odd-ball packages with (a substantial number of) files for which the
decision of where to put them is not obvious.  Or worse yet, has been
decided at compile time, which is difficult for the package manager to
know about.  This suggests to me that it is highly improbable that
such a solution will ever exist...

> Something that will automatically figure out recursive layers of
> dependencies, search all kinds of archives for them, and do it all
> automagically (with just user confirmation...)

So, then, apt-get/dpkg is what you want.  Run debian or a derivative.
These days, RHN is pretty close to the same thing...  Or you can run
apt-get for rpm-based systems.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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