[haiku-development] PM proposal: moving home/config/apps
- From: Julian Harnath <julian.harnath@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 01:08:35 +0200
Hello everyone,
I finally upgraded my main Haiku installation to the latest PM-based
nightly now. The package managment is awesome and I've started to
package up things I've been copying from one Haiku-installation to the
next for a long time to make that a simpler process in the future.
I've noticed a semantic (usability-)problem with the fact that user-
installed applications are now in /boot/home/config/apps.
Let's look at a testcase: a while ago I ported MilkyTracker and now I
want to create a hpkg for it. Before, it was simply a self-contained
zip-file and its contents looked like this:
http://www.orangejua.de/moo/temp/mt-contents.png
The "old way" experience: user unzips it and it becomes immediately
obvious to them that there is also some bundled documentation files and
also a "songs" subfolder. In there, they find some example songs to try
out and get started to explore the program's capabilities immediately.
Now the experience with a single hpkg file: the user installs it by
drag&drop to /boot/home/config/packages or maybe in the future via
HaikuDepot. The MilkyTracker application will turn up in the Deskbar
menu immediately, but that's it. They won't see the documentation and
also not that there are example songs. If they are a novice, they won't
have the idea to look for such things in /boot/home/config/apps -- after
all, why even look for applications in a subfolder named "config"? I'd
expect only settings files and such in there and "config" folders sound
rather scary anyway.
One way out would be what I'd call the "windows"-way: instead of simply
creating a single application symlink in the Deskbar menu, create whole
folders for the application containing more symlinks to documentation
and such. I find that ugly, it quickly clutters the menu.
A different solution, which I want to propose, is to move (or at least
symlink) the user-installed packaged applications folder to
/boot/home/apps. A user would be more inclined to look in there for
additional documentation or example files of an application. And even
as an experienced user who knows where to look.. I find it just odd to
have "apps" as a subfolder of "config".
Comments, thoughts on this?
--
So long, jua
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