Hi Ankur
As a Fedora user for the past 8 years, one of the major frustrations I had was with
finding things about Fedora from within the Fedora websites. The best information I
gained came from word of mouth. This means that the website has many subgroups, with a
common home directory to allow me to go from it to the subgroup of interest. I also think
that the website has to be split into a group, directed at "developers and
maintainers" of software, and another directed to "end-users". Outside of
Fedora.org are forums are where I found some information to allow me to enjoy Fedora
software items of interest to me.
I would like to be a Fedora promoter, Actually, I point people to the Fedora home page but
then they go to Ubuntu or Mint, because it is so much easier to find information with the
latter two than with Fedora. I hired students from our junior colleges and I discovered
that our junior colleges push people to Debian/Ubuntu, and I would like to change that.
A welcome website is one that asks what is the user's purpose of visit. This would be
a good start. From there, he could follow menus to a) internal projects, b) reference
documents, c) spins and stuff, d) external sites, and topics of interest, including a
directing of the user to rpmfusion.
I struggled for ages to remember rpmfusion as a name. It did not stick in my head as
easy to remember. I also tended to do a clean installation with every new release, and
then to recall what I had as my collection of downloaded programs. I spent an hour or two
an evening, scanning the available software after every clean installation.
Within Fedora, things have greatly improved since 2004. We can use the software library,
with the built-in search function to find software related to tags (topics). I for
example make great use of yumex to fix occasional bugs with yum. (yumex allows me to see
the actual installed list and to delete conflicts that yum finds but does not help me to
resolve.)
I am subscribed to several Fedora groups, and enjoy and occasionally participate in many
discussions.
I have feedback to provide to your responses. We are not in conflict, but my perspective
is how to get a person with a new computer or an old XP or Vista computer to switch to
Fedora, and to stay with Fedora. Some of my user friends are retired visitors to YouTube,
to sites of interest, and to technology. They would consider Fedora, but are frightened
away by the lack of warmness, lack of software to support viewing YouTube videos, music,
etc.
I guess I am saying that to promote Fedora, which is what I was aiming to do, was to
provide some warm cozy mentoring via an easy to reach forum, sponsored by Fedora
directly.
So, back to my categories. These are based on human interests, not necessarily on
technological interests. Packages, in my mind are really my topics of interest. In this
regard, the intersection of two packages may share common applications;(the installation
of the second package would detect that some of the programs are already installed.)
Back to being a spokesperson for Fedora, the spins are great concepts and I praise the
people involved. I feel we need some articles for the popular magazines, such as
doing photography editing with Fedora, making and editing videos with Fedora, etc.
We could use articles based on my list below. I could edit or write some. Foremost is
that groupings of applications to respond to a business or hobby need does not mean that
the system admin or network administrator should be left out.
I have never built a package, nor have I gone through the steps to review one. Usually,
like everyone else, I like the cookbook. You know... step 1, retrieve the package. step2
...step final.
You asked...
Doesn't this web interface let you find your packages though?
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/apps/name/list/
The answer is no. Using the website, I asked, for a list of all programs related to
webdesign, The result was zero returned. Where are matches to my request word? I also
feel that a response should have a brief writeup to describe what the program can do,
along with a date of last update?
If my interests are for another group, please advise me and redirect me to it. By the
way, I never knew of the above listed website. You see, home does not send me to a
"true Fedora home page", it sends me to the package database home. That package
kit database is a in a cocoon by itself; your word of mouth (this email), revealed it to
me.
Leslie
From: Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Fedora-join] APAC Web FAD proposal -> Package maintainer's wishlist
clean up
To: "Fedora Join Mailing list" <fedora-join(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
Date: Wednesday, October 31, 2012, 6:41 PM
Hi Leslie,
On Wed, 2012-10-31 at 07:01 -0700, Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
Regarding the list, it has to have something for everyone. I for
example, never do more than play Free Cell as a game, I do
programming, but don't think gcc should be included initially.
So lets look at the categories of users.
a) Internet, Chat, IRC and Email Users
b) Games People
c) Networking People
d) Music Listeners
e) Graphics Users
f) System Administrators / Desktop users
g) Linux Maintainers.
h) Children ages to 10years
i) Office and Writers
j) Programmers -- Web, GUI, Python, C++, C, Ruby, Other.
Essentially, the categories listed in anaconda for earlier Fedora
versions seem to be the categories of interest.
Please update the list by adding or removing from the above or
splitting out some entries from the list.
With that, in mind, I can create a spreadsheet with a heading and
columns
corresponding to the topics indicated.
This is out of scope of the list. The wishlist does *not* aim to be a
package database. It merely lists packages that anyone
(maintainers/users) use and would like to see in Fedora, ie, these
packages are not yet available in the repositories.
I also thought that we could also include a few small shell scripts to
download one or more categories; This will help the person to save
hours of searching for programs of interest.
Unfortunately, no shell script will server everyone's purpose. It just
isn't feasible :/
The GUI package managers do a pretty good job, as I last heard. I stick
to yum, but I don't expect new users to do that. There's an idea for a
fedora application marketplace like thing, but I'm not current on it's
progress at the moment.
Doesn't this web interface let you find your packages though?
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/apps/name/list/
I firmly believe that the free section of rpm fusion should be
included. The free section has legal FOSS programs for downloading.
As well, perhaps an entry in Firefox to the rpmfusion website.
The alternate distributions (debian based) already provide abilities
to download non open source stuff such as codecs.
Should we be asking for volunteer contributions, or leave that for
Fedora 20+ ? (Could we get all the codecs for a dollar, as an
example?). I frequently take courses via the web and youtube is
essential to view. There is no real open source viewer for youtube.
It's a small price to pay for sticking to FOSS. RPMFusion and the rest
are readily visible and available. We'd (at least I'd personally) prefer
to keep it the way it is.
There are various legal issues with even mentioning RPMFusion links in
fedora distributions. However, IANAL, and therefore this discussion is
not fruitful. I can assure you that such discussions have happened
earlier, and our current stance is not arbitrary, rather a result of
these discussions.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations
--
Thanks,
Warm regards,
Ankur: "FranciscoD"
Please only print if necessary.
Looking to contribute to Fedora? Look here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Join_SIG
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha
http://dodoincfedora.wordpress.com/
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