Simplifying the PPM GUI

One person has already experienced confusion with the two sets of radiobuttons, a vertical row for category and horizontal row for alphabetization. I introduced the alphabetic groupings because of the enormous Debian and Ubuntu repositories causing gtkdialog to become excessively slow.

Actually, I am developing some reservations about the Debian packages. One thing that I don't like is they split one package into many, plus create various "dummy" or "meta" packages. Some packages, like glibc, are split into several binary packages. So when they boast that one repo has 20,000 packages, divide that by about 4.

Anyway, the plethora of Debian/Ubuntu packages is the problem. I'm thinking, if PPM detects that it doesn't have to display a Debian or Ubuntu repo, then the main GUI window will default to not having the horizontal row of alphabetic radiobuttons -- like it was in the older Puppy package manager.

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Comments

PPM confusion
Username: dogone
The challenge with PPM I experience most often is having to manage three settings - repo, category and alpha group. The workaround is to select the first and leave that latter to at "ALL". PPM slows considerably as a result. "Find" then becomes my primary PPM tool. Perhaps a better, simpler approach is for Find to work more like a search engine, working with multiple terms and basic boolean operators. A user could then simply search for "wordprocessor" or more specifically for, "abi" AND "wordprocessor" AND "debian". For that matter, is it be possible for PPM to "farm out" the search function altogether to a custom Google search? The user would employ Google via PPM's interface to find a package. PPM would then use the results to identify and process the package. Why reinvent the wheel when Google's already got one rolling?

Tags: woof