Andrew Lutomirski (luto(a)mit.edu) said:
On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 10:36 AM, Miloslav Trmač
<mitr(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>> While I think you are right in some cases like cashier, isn't this
>> discussion really about the Fedora Workstation?! Since for this the
>> target user is a developer, can we just agree that in this case the user
>> needs both CLI and GUI apps (although some developers certainly sticks
>> to one of them).
>
> The gist is that
> * Nobody _should_ need to use a terminal: non-developers¹ don’t need it, and
developers deserve a better environment. It’s “only” a matter of writing lots of new
software. AFAICT Workstation would in some ideal future want to get to this state. (And
non-Linux operating systems are getting closer and closer to this ideal over time.)
Having watched people develop under Mac OS X, they have really shiny
things to play with. Xcode is pretty, and there are whole pile of
nice editors and such to use. Heck, even Firefox and Chromium are
gradually turning into developer tools as opposed to just being
browsers and debuggers.
Nonetheless, the productive Mac OS X developers I know all have
something like an entire desktop devoted to just running terminals.
Given that no one, on any OS I've ever seen*, has come up with
something better than a terminal for running scripts, watching log
messages scroll by, using fancy shell commands, etc., I think that
expecting Fedora to magically solve all these problems is both overly
optimistic and is an entirely inappropriate assumption to base the OS
design on.
I'm not sure that GNOME Software is the right place to solve this, though -
if I'm using the terminal to build things:
- I shouldn't be searching for grep/sed/awk - those are part of the base
operating system, and should be treated as such.
- I shouldn't be searching for gcc, gcc-c++, make, etc. as separate
promoted to GNOME Software applications; those should be treated as part
of a development kit that's installed and updated as a unit, any more than
I should be searching for libgweather or libdrm as part of installing a
desktop app.
- Even searching for -devel packages implies a "target == host" build
sensibility that is relevant mostly to those developing Fedora, and
not to most of those developers that I run into on a day-to-day basis
(and likely not the developers we're targeting.) They're interested
in using mock along with system libraries for RHEL/CentOS, using
pip/npm/rubygems, etc.
Bill